Category Archives: Uncategorized

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Tube Boobs

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Today’s post comes from Bathtub Safety Officer Rafferty.

At ease, civilians! But stay vigilant. Sound the alarm whenever radical new ideas expose you to risk! Even theoretical risk, which could lead directly to imaginary dismemberment or even hypothesized death.

Yes, I’m thinking of industrialist/inventor Elon Musk’s intriguing, controversial Hyperloop. Musk has imagined an enclosed travel-tube stretching from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He pictures us climbing into vehicles that shoot through the tube on cushions of air, propelled by a magnetic pulse to speeds of up to 800 miles per hour.

tube_room

If you’re thinking of one of those pneumatic devices that carries cash, checks and dog treats from the parking lot to the teller and back to your car in branch banking, Elon Musk will call you a moron and take his billions elsewhere in head-shaking disgust. But that’s what I’m picturing anyway, and it does not comfort me. Even if everything is OK on the journey from point A to point B, what about the people who handle the tube when it arrives at its destination? During the heyday of pneumatic office communication, the weak link always happened in the basement where all the tubes ended and various boobs and imbeciles fumbled to open the capsules and spilled the precious contents onto a dank cement floor. Or at least that’s how I picture it.

Receiving Musk’s scorn now is a small price to pay compared to what it would feel like to climb into one of his tubes and realize, too late, that you’ve been had. But then climbing into a tube of any kind is alarming. I had a bad experience once with a water park tube slide that had to do with someone else’s bodily functions and not enough space between travelers. And I’m sure I don’t have to point out to you that once you knock off the wings and the tail, an airplane is tube-shaped. Risk minimizers will tell you that a large, commercial airplane is incredibly safe, but look how easily I knocked off the wings and the tail! It didn’t even take an entire sentence.

I like having escape options, so I would want Musk’s speeding travel pods and the tubes they rocket through to have frequently spaced egress hatches in case I have to climb out for a breath of fresh air, or to escape flames, or to run away from snakes. But at the same time, I would worry while pfooshing down the California coast line that some low-level workman had left a hatch ajar. That can’t end well!

As a professional public-safety scold, it’s my job to seriously consider every worst-case scenario. So I worry about the pull of gravity every time I lift one of my feet off the ground! After all, think of the possibilities! Most of them aren’t pretty.

People say Elon Musk is our most imaginative business leader and technological visionary. But when I dwell on all the ways you could be mangled in his Hyperloop and then hear him say the thing is perfectly safe, it’s obvious that he’s just not imaginative enough!

Yours in Safety,
B.S.O.R.


What could go wrong?

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A Little Light Opera

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When I decided to change the 20 year old lights hanging outside the house, I figured it would be a simple matter of unscrewing some things and twisting a few wires together.

After turning off the electricity, of course. Then – instant makeover!

The good news is – I was successful in turning off the electricity. The rest of it was an overly optimistic dream. I’ll spare you the gruesome details except to say when bolt holes and bolts don’t line up, one particularly useless strategy is to keep looking at the same pieces arranged in the very same configuration while hoping they’ll somehow change their shape between one glance and the next.

My half-hour project took 6 hours to complete thanks to my insistence that magic was the real answer.

In reality, success required the random discovery of a couple of spare connectors in a basement jar, my clever wife’s suggestion that I rotate one backing plate a quarter turn, and a frustration-fueled last-minute improvisation ignited, in part, by the certain belief that I was 20 minutes away from being devoured by late evening mosquitos.

Now the new lights are up and shining so harshly that squirrels scurrying over the driveway are cast in sharp relief against the house across the street. Our entire front yard is illuminated with that special compact fluorescent intensity that says “Go Away!” And because I’m intimately familiar with how these appliances are connected to the wall, I’m waiting for the first mild gust of wind to put them in the bushes.

In short, exactly the effect I was going for. Make-over complete!

Describe a recent project that took longer than you expected.

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Time Stands Still

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Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden, who has been held back in his grade at Wendell Wilkie High School every year since 1983.

Public domain image, royalty free stock photo from www.public-domain-image.com

Hey, Mr. C.,

Well, school is about to begin again and I’m going to be a sophomore for, like, the 30th time!

Some people tell me I should move on, but when I ask them what part of their life they remember best, it usually turns out to be those crazy high school years. A lot of folks say they wish they could do it all over again, but everybody knows you can’t go back.

So I’m trying to find out if you can just refuse to leave.

Sometimes people ask if I’m bothered to be so much older than my classmates, and the answer is “No!” The other kids treat me like I’m Yoda, which is great! Every now and then I’ll pull someone aside and say something like “Very powerful with this one the Force is.” They eat that stuff up. In fact, there’s gaggle of freshmen following me around right now. They’re hoping I’ll teach them to levitate, but when stuff like that comes up I try to stay enigmatic. You’ve got to keep people guessing.

Especially when you don’t really know how to levitate. But I can throw around a five dollar word like “enigmatic.” That comes in handy. People are really easy to impress these days.

One thing that I’m sure works in my favor is standardized testing. Now that the scores the school puts up are such a big dang deal, the principal is kind of grateful to have someone around who knows the exams backwards and forwards. I’m really, really good at filling in those multiple-choice ovals, and I make sure everybody stays serious at test time!

You’re probably wondering how somebody who is so good at test-taking still manages to be kept back year after year. Here’s the deal – I take lots of days off. About two months all told, every year. A lot of times I only put in a three day week. I can get away with it pretty easy. It’s not my fault the administration cut Truancy Officers so they’d have enough money to serve fresh vegetables at lunch.

Me being a high school sophomore pretty much forever is kind of like the Jeff Bezos-funded 10,000 Year Clock, which is being built right now inside a mountain in Texas. People laugh about it but I think the idea is super cool! These clockmakers really take the long view. I heard from somebody that the movement is so slow, it ticks one year and tocks the next. And it gets its energy from temperature changes and the in-and-out movement of visitors who come to hear its chimes.

That’s just like me – I’m super relaxed and I never get upset, but every now and then I’ll put on a bit of a show just to remind people I’m still here. For the most part, people think I’m charming. Another 30 years and the girls will start to think I’m cute again. One thing for sure – I’ll be at Wilkie a long, long time. Probably not 10,000 years, but who knows? They say “time flies when you’re having fun,” but I’m having a blast, and time is going very, very slowly.

Your Pal,
Bubby

I do think of Bubby as living a life that is a work of art with an extended time horizon. He occasionally writes to me about various schemes that he hopes will support him “when he grows up”, but we both know being a Sophomore at Wendell Wilkie High is (and will always be) his real job.

Name a place you’ve been that you would be happy to never leave.

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Ask Dr. Babooner

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Dear Dr. Babooner,

Ann_Landers baboon 2 copy

I had some big plans to spend the day with an important out-of-town visitor a few weeks from now. It’s not romantic – we are in the same line of work (country-running) and I think of him as someone who understands the unique challenges of the business. I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, so let’s call him “Barack Obama”. I wouldn’t say I have much to learn from him or that we’re equals, exactly. I just want to hang out with someone who “gets it”, if you know what I mean. While we are both powerful in our own way, one of us is going to keep his job a lot longer than the other (hint: it’s not him).

Anyway, we traded messages and I thought the meeting was set. Then out of the blue I get a call saying “Barack Obama” is canceling because we don’t have much to talk about! While I agree we aren’t the closest of friends, I’m shocked and hurt to be treated this way. After all, I’m pretty important. People who cross me have a habit of winding up dead. I’m not admitting anything, I’m just saying that nobody cancels a meeting with me! It’s a new, and not very pleasant, sensation. Now that I’ve been embarrassed by this sudden change, I feel like we really DO have a lot to talk about.

There are several reasons this happened. Mostly, he’s upset because I’m friendly towards two people he’s angry with.

Isn’t that a little childish?

One of the guys “Barack Obama” is ticked at let some secrets slip about some snooping and other clandestine things that aren’t too flattering. That’s unfortunate, but no one is arguing that the charges are lies, so I don’t see where “Barack Obama” has the standing to be angry. I tend to think honesty is the best policy. For other people, anyway.

The second guy is also a presidential-type country-runner who got himself into a bad situation and is dealing with it by being violent and merciless on the upper end of the evil-villian scale of bloodthirsty retribution. Again, I don’t condone this sort of behavior unless I wind up having to do it myself, which I could totally see happening someday.

I’m not saying that these are the best guys in the world. In fact, one of them might be the worst. But is it ever right to punish someone for their friendly and open-minded attitude towards other people?

Uncertainly,
Vlad

I told “Vlad” that Junior High School never really ends. Folks often pressure others to ostracize a person because of the way that person looks or the clothes they wear or the things they believe or the laws they break of the innocents they murder.

I commended Vlad for not caving in, and told him he’d eventually get over missing his meeting with “Barack Obama”. And even though the relationships he’s protecting are not particularly important to him, it’s the principle that matters. You can’t let someone else push you around because they don’t like your not-really-my-friends. If you let that happen, you could someday wind up with no one who is close, kind of like a tyrant or a secret agent, or both.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

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Larger Than Life

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Today’s post comes from Bart, the bear who found a smart phone in the woods.

He promises to sit VERY still.
He promises to sit VERY still.

Yo, Bart here.

I know they call these the “dog days” of summer, but as a bear I can tell you that things are pretty darn quiet for us, too. I could nap all day! I guess Al Roker gets the same feeling sometimes. Sure, I know who Al Roker is. You think I was born in a barn?

When I’m not napping I waste hours and hours wandering around the internet. Pretty amazing how the time just melts away, but at least I’m not getting into trouble at campsites. I hear when the game wardens trap you or they shoot you with one of those tranquilizer darts, the first thing they do is take away your phone. Bummer.

Anyway, I got really excited when I found this video and the article that goes with it.

A huge bear was captured and released, and some guy who makes things out of concrete saw the video and wants to do a statue of him. But the bear is already gone, so he wrote to the naturalists to get the measurements so he could get the proportions right.

It would be awesome to have an enormous statue made of me, using concrete or anything! So here’s the deal – I’ll pose for anyone who wants to do a bear sculpture. The only conditions are:

  • No tickling
  • All the berries I can eat
  • My name goes on the plaque
  • I get to go home when it’s done

Deal? Honest, it’s kind of quiet now, and I just sit around all day anyway! Just remember, bear season hasn’t started yet.

Your pal,
Bart

What does the inscription say on the statue of you?

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Hobby Farm

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Today’s post comes from disgraced former journalist Bud Buck.

People often ask me to explain how, as a one-time newsboy poster child and respected radio anchor, I became a disgraced former journalist. I always tell them if they’ll simply sweeten my palm with a $20, the story is theirs. Sometimes it works.

Newsboy

The short version is this – it became so difficult to manage all the true information that was in the world, as a self defense mechanism I started to make things up. It worked for a while and I began to see my job as a form of self-expression. It didn’t hurt to lie so much when I remembered that it really was all about me!

And now the rickety tower that was once the institution of American journalism is approaching total collapse with word that a famous newspaper with a storied tradition will be purchased by a very rich guy who needs a new toy to play with. And yes, I just ended a sentence with a preposition. That’s how dead good writing is! Deal with it!

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, bought the Washington Post for 250 million dollars. It’s not a takeover by Amazon because Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest men, is buying it as an individual.

And yes, he got free shipping!

Bezos is famous for focusing on “the customer experience.” I can only guess that his experience as a Washington Post buyer was satisfactory, though I guess I’ll have to wait for the customer review to be certain. But one thing you won’t have to wait for is the pundit review. People who write opinions for a living have fallen on this story like a family of bears on the last picnic basket in the woods. They are tearing it apart because it features all the things they love – journalism, money, and … well, that’s about it.

My opinion hardly matters in all this, except to me. And that’s the point! This is the next logical step in the total disintegration of communications. Every person is now his or her own media empire. I suspect Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post because he didn’t have time to start his own blog. Look for someone richer to step up soon to buy The New York Times, and someone wealthier still to snap up CBS, NBC and finally Trail Baboon. Then it’s a total free-for-all!

Someday soon, when every news source is a vanity project beholden to a single personality, we will all be so busy filtering and interpreting information we won’t have time to actually know anything. And when that day comes, I won’t waste your time with an “I told you so.”

Instead, I’ll say “Welcome to my world.”

This is Bud Buck!

Who do you trust?

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Deep In The Weeds

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Speaking of working steadily at a task that feels endless (as we were yesterday), I have been slowly making my way around the yard hand-weeding some planting beds that have been allowed to go to seed.

The original plan was to keep these areas heavily mulched and carefully tended to provide some space where flowers, ornamental grasses, trees and bushes could thrive. And at first, that’s how it worked. But over time the mulch dissolved (as expected) and while I was looking the other way, the beds have filled in with misshapen, spiky intruders from Mars.

I could go after the invaders with a noxious chemical cocktail, but that’s a solution for cowards. I need to confront the weeds personally, face to frond. Besides, there is always a risk that any foliage killer I spray on unwanted greenery will drift off and murder the more upstanding flora I’m trying to protect. I suppose it’s like keeping a loaded gun in the house. With very little effort you can do more damage than the threat you armed yourself against at the beginning.

These photos show you the scope of the task.

Backyard Vengeance Tour – the results

My approach is simple and brutal. I drop to my knees and claw at the Earth with a three pronged hook held in my right hand. As the soil is loosened I grab the weed with my left hand and toss it into a bucket. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. If it sounds “old school”, you’re right. This is basically the technique our prehistoric ancestors used to spiff things up around the entrances to their caves. I flung myself at the problem for several hours straight on Saturday, all the while wondering what possible good could come of it.

In the sandy areas, scurrying ants reproached me for destroying their cities. I tried to explain that I was down here with them because I was withholding my support from Monsanto, but the ants were too busy running in panic to pay me much mind.

I continued to dig. After an hour, I found it very difficult to stand up straight. After two hours, I had a sense that if I suddenly keeled over, the weeds could reclaim everything before I was cold.
Weeding must be the opposite of teaching. You can see immediate results, but you can be pretty certain your work will have absolutely no effect at all on the future.

To which pointless chore have you given too much of your time?

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1,000 Bottles of Beer

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This is post number 1,000 on Trail Baboon, all written by me or as guest entries by various baboons.

I’m exhausted, and proud. The total overall number is a convenient landmark because all I have to do is count the guest posts to know that TB is an amazing 16.4% reader-written.

beerwall

That’s better than the New York Times, by far.

It didn’t seem very long ago that we observed reaching the landmark of post number 500. That was an achievement, but this is better. I would almost say it’s exactly twice as good.

And so through stubbornness, determination, or simply as a result of habitual behavior and lacking the creativity to do anything different, we have moved into 4-digit territory, post-wise. And one of the things that sets blogging apart from books or a pile of paper newspapers is that all the writing we’ve done remains online for people to stumble across as if it had just appeared – fresh and new to each set of eyes that beholds it for the first time as long as they don’t look at the date or read any of the obsolete references included in the text.

That’s a form of immortality, isn’t it? Or longevity, at least?

And taken together, one could argue that we’ve collaborated to write a very long book that is “scattered and unfocused in subject and style, featuring a variety of occasionally compelling and sometimes incomplete characters drawn with varying degrees of skill.”

I put that line in quotes because I’m pretty sure someone’s actual book has been reviewed that way.

If you measure success in terms of readership, as opposed to simply counting raw numbers of posts, you would have to say Trail Baboon is consistent but certainly not growing.
Here’s a screen shot of our monthly readership statistics since January, 2011. We appear to get between 60 and 90 visitors a day, with each reader refreshing the page 4 to 7 times.
That adds up and it starts to look like a lot when you view it on a monthly basis, but in truth our community is rather small. But loyal!

Remarkably, our total numbers for the month of July 2011 and July 2013 were almost exactly the same though two years apart – 13,096 vs. 13,094.

Screen Shot 2013-08-03 at 8.47.16 AM

At any rate, congratulations, Baboons. Our achievement puts me in mind of a classic anthem sung by high-achievers throughout time:

One Thousand Bottles of Beer On The Wall,
One Thousand Bottles of Beer!
Take One Down, Pass it Around.
Nine Hundred Ninety Nine Bottles of Beer on The Wall.

Nine Hundred Ninety Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,
Nine Hundred Ninety Nine Bottles of Beer!
Take one down …

How do you pace yourself to reach a distant goal?

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A Sense of Achievement

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Today’s post comes from Congressman Loomis Beechly, representing all the water surface area in the State of Minnesota.

beechly-speech

Greetings Constituents!

As your elected Representative, I wanted to take a moment before my Summer Break begins to thank each one of you for the calls you’ve made and the mail you’ve ee’d about the work of our 113th Congress! I agree with all of you on everything you said, and every single concern you expressed is my number one priority! And I know that many of my colleagues in the House feel exactly the same way about all their constituents too.

In the end, politics is pretty simple. We just want to be loved. And how do you show someone you love them? You listen, and do what you’re told, of course!

I’m not using that as an excuse, but it does help explain why we in Congress are currently having a hard time getting things done. Face it – you’re confusing!

I’m not saying it’s your fault, because that would get me in even more trouble. But maybe you should look at this in a different way. Right now, with multi-tasking being All The Rage, we have to ask ourselves if we in Congress are setting a good example for the busy people of this great nation.

So many Americans are trying to squeeze more productivity out of each and every minute, you can’t blame them for feeling overwhelmed and under appreciated! There is simply too much to do, and no one is speaking against the urge to do even more. Why? Because no one has that kind of time! And as long as productivity stays high, there’s no reason for employers to even consider hiring the laid-off millions who are exhausting themselves daily in a fruitless search for work.

That’s where we, your elected Representatives, come to the rescue.

As leaders, our task right now is to lead the American workforce towards acceptance of a bigger and better standard of idleness. We are aggressively doing nothing in excellent style while eating great food and wearing nice clothes. And we’re doing it for an unselfish reason – to show you what real recreational non-productivity looks like. When I’m home in my district, I model this by fishing all day. Here in Washington, I have to show it by talking endlessly about nothing in particular and reaching no compromises of any kind. It’s like fishing, but without the catch. I just release, constantly.

Only by doing this can I make it safe for you to begin to relax and to stop multi-tasking. Because no matter how lazy and worthless you become, you can be certain that your existence is still not as pointless as that of your Congressman.

So the next time some sourpuss points out that the House has accomplished practically nothing this session, I hope you’ll do what I would do – respond with a smile, a nod, a word of gratitude, and a nap.

Your Congressman,
Loomis Beechly

How productive are you?

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Lousy Little Leaker

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Although I never quite made it to the Bradley Manning level, I’ve been a leaker most of my life for all the wrong reasons. It’s not that I believe in truth or justice or transparency – I just want a little attention. That’s why, one night at the dinner table when I was eleven years old, I cagily revealed to my older brother that he was going to find a Matchbox Car in his birthday haul the next day, but I was not going to tell him which one in the set he was going to receive.

Jaguar

This, I thought, would give me supreme power over him.

Naturally, my mother was outraged that I had betrayed her confidence. I was sent to my room immediately, forced to skip desert.

At the time, I didn’t quite understand the outrage. We each had accumulated a ton of the tiny metal cars, so getting another one was not that big a deal. Which model though? That was the key (as any collector would understand), and I was keeping that significant detail to myself. He would be tormented to have to spend the night knowing there was a new vehicle in his stable and wondering which one it was, praying and hoping it would be the Jaguar XKE when I knew full well it was the Ford Galaxie Police Cruiser. Not only would he spend the night in agony, his morning would be poisoned by disappointment.

Police_cruiser

No actual harm done. What’s the problem?

But in my mother’s mind, I had spoiled her surprise, and I played Edward Snowden to her Lindsey Graham. If she’d had access to the worst gateway lounge in a Russian airport, she would have marooned me there forever, or at least until I apologized to everyone in our family minus the dog.

Which was odd, considering that a few months later the dog was the one who would eventually wind up with that Matchbox Car firmly in his mouth – an unsatisfying substitute for a bone on a dreary, nothing-happening day.

When have you spilled a big secret?