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The Mean Girl Strategy

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Today’s post comes from Congressman Loomis Beechly, representing Minnesota’s 9th district – all the water surface area in the state.

Beechly addresses some "cool" people.
Beechly addresses some “cool” people.

Greetings, Constituents!

I’m enjoying my summer break at home in the 9th district by spending endless hours fishing, swimming, floating around on inner tubes, and thinking about clearing out weeds along the shoreline. I probably won’t do any aquatic plant management though, becuase I always wind up taking a nap once I start to read about it.

One thing I’ve learned about lawmaking is that it gets very, very dreary once you start to read and study the regulations you’re considering. Working out a compromise with other people can get even more complicated! Thinking is hard!

It’s much more fun to just react emotionally to random things you’ve heard. That’s why I’m so excited about this new development in the 2016 Presidential contest, courtesy of Reince Priebus, chairman of the Republican National Party.

He has issued a challenge – if NBC and CNN choose to air some planned and assumed-to-be-complimentary docu-dramas about expected Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, Republicans will refuse to cooperate with them on the broadcast of 2016 presidential debates.

This is smart because in the last election cycle, Presidential Debates were showing signs of getting to be too popular. If you’re like me, you don’t want to get drawn into something that a lot of people look at where you don’t control every detail.

I’m not a Republican (or Democrat), but I want to congratulate Reince on finally getting us to the place where we all want to be – from a capital where people work hard on details and pay lip service to compromise and bi-partisanship, to a Congress where there’s no need to pretend – all the animosity is out in the open and the Mean Girl Strategy can be freely applied.

You may remember the Mean Girl Strategy from Junior High – “Be friends with Hilary if you want, but if we catch you hanging out with her, it’s over between us forever!”

Some people may call this childish and petty, but those people are losers and should be shunned!

This gives us a nice, easy short-cut to our difficult decision making. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how incredibly difficult it is to represent you in the Halls of Congress, but let me be blunt – your flip-floppiness on major issues leaves me wondering, sometimes, what I should do. For example, on the recent events in Egypt I’ve heard from you that we should:

  • Cut off all aid to Egypt’s military
  • Increase aid to Egypt’s military
  • Invade
  • Bomb the pyramids
  • Fund more Walleye farms on the Nile.

Too many options! What am I supposed to do?

When it comes to complicated issues like this, it’s much easier to figure out who we all hate so we can listen to their pronouncements and just be against whatever they say, regardless of the reasoning.

Soon I’ll be going back to Our Nation’s Capital to do the Work You Elected Me To Do – pointing my finger and stomping my foot!  Yes, it’s a difficult assignment, but not nearly as hard as it could be!

Your Congressman,
Loomis Beechly

When the work gets complicated, what’s your favorite short cut?

Poems

A Few Lines For The Olinguito

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Olinguito

It’s with some trepidation that I share this news:  A previously unidentified mammal has entered the known-by-humans universe. Of course the Olinguito would have been fine without us, but we have been desperate for it, having exploited and anthropomorphized every other available creature.

This little beauty was pursued by a curious observer who must be wondering right now what he has wrought for this apparently harmless dweller of the rain forest canopy.

The good news in this development is that for storytellers, there is finally an animal who hasn’t already been employed as a muse. What writer, for example, has not despaired of creating a poem featuring a nightingale, knowing that Keats got there first and ruined it for everyone.

An Ode to the Olinquito

No creature has been more discreet, oh
Undiscovered Olinguito.

Unlike Hippos or Giraffes,
who, mugging for the easy laughs,

were captured with abundant ease
while you hid out in tops of trees.

Alone, alive, aloft, alert
a totem for the introvert,

concealed in clouds of jungle fog,
the world now gasps and points, agog!

Alas, your cover has been blown,
but now at least you know you’re known.

Prepare yourself to be festooned,
bedazzled, storied and cartooned.

Oh Olinguito, please stay fleet
and pray that you’re not good to eat.

An Olinquito walks into a bar and hops up on to the stool next to you. After a few drinks he reveals he and his kind have been in hiding for thousands of years, but now they’re out. You’d like to take his picture, but out of respect, you don’t. Good thing you don’t – he is beside himself with worry about deforestation and paparazzi from the National Geographic. Finally, he turns to you and says,

“What would you do if you were me?”

Uncategorized

Menu Planning

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

Bart Blackberry2

Yo, Bart here.

So I’m seeing a lot of articles about this group of humans who let themselves be locked in a crate out on the barren slopes of a mountain in Hawaii for three months – all to see if they could make interesting meals out of nothing but the kind of ingredients that could be shipped to Mars. You know, freeze dried beef, rice, lentils, dried fruit and Spam.

It’s called HI-SEAS,for Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation.

The project just finished up and you can read all about the different things they did, including exploring around the site wearing “spacesuits” and alternating their meal schedule between pre-packaged dinners and feasts they invented or put together using suggestions from online visitors. I guess one of the best recipes they got came from a professional chef who told them how to make Moroccan Beef Tangine.

That one really hit home for me. We bears are pretty much all about making the best possible balanced meal out of the stuff we can find around the edges of an ordinary campground. Here’s my recipe for Scavenger Salad:

Ingredients:

  • Twinkies
  • Doritos
  • Half eaten Buffalo Wings
  • Gummi Bears
  • Marshmallows
  • Graham Crackers
  • Juice Boxes
  • Ketchup and Mustard Packets

Directions:

  1. Throw everything in a pile.
  2. Eat.

It’s kind of cool to look at the ingredients list they had to work with at HI-SEAS.  It’s a better selection than we bears usually get.   Seeing this, I’m pretty sure I know what I would have done if they’d picked me to be on the crew.

  1. Eat all the cashews.
  2. Eat all the beef, sausage, pepperoni and Spam.
  3. Eat all the peanut butter and nutella.
  4. Eat all the molasses and brown sugar.
  5. Rest.
  6. Eat everything else.

Surviving on Mars wouldn’t be so hard!

Your pal,
Bart

What meal do you make when you don’t have the makings for any of your favorite meals?

Uncategorized

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?

Uncategorized

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.

Uncategorized

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.

Science

Yawn Shop

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A new study says dogs yawn more in response to yawns from their owners than they do to the yawns of strangers. I just tried to make this happen with my dog by yawning several times right in her face. She wouldn’t look at me, possibly out of embarrassment. Or maybe I need to brush my teeth.

Diamond_yawning

But I did start to feel a little tired, so we took a twenty minute nap.

While sleeping I had a short dream that I was a frightened chipmunk running from a Rottweiler who had cornered me at the back of an open garage. With no easy escape, I cowered in a corner as the animal stood over me, drooling and trembling in the same way a movie villain pauses over a supposedly-vanquished superhero or secret agent to make a speech before delivering the final blow. It was a garage, so I considered grabbing a shovel from a hook on the wall and using it to force the dog to back away, but then I remembered, I’m a chipmunk – no hands. So I yawned. Amazingly, that caused the dog to pause for a moment, so I yawned again. The dog tipped its head to one side the way dogs do when they appear to be confused. I yawned a third time, and incredibly, the Rottweiler also opened its mouth wide.

Then I woke up.

I’m not sure this proves anything other than the potential fact that it is not very satisfying to fall asleep while reading science articles because it leads to complicated dreams about research. Maybe articles about yawning studies are bigger snoozers than comparable research papers. I should get a grant to study the phenomenon!

Contagious yawning has been observed and extensively documented between humans, chimpanzees and baboons, and there is reason to believe we have a stronger response to yawns from those we care about. Although the researchers in that study assumed the relationship between family members is automatically a more caring one than any relationship with others. That may not always be the case, since family members can be quite vicious towards one another (see Rottweiler, above).

There is also a theory out there that spontaneous yawning is a natural physical response intended to cool an overheated brain. I suppose you could observe this in any classroom where SAT tests are administered. Perhaps there is also a connection between test-induced yawning and spitwad formation in 16 year olds.

Back to my dog – she is definitely not responding to all the yawn cues I’m giving her, but she has started to obsessively lick a sore spot on her left rear leg. In this case, the theory of empathetic mimicry is not holding up. Although I am feeling a strong urge right now to bite my own ankles.

What makes you yawn?

Poems

The Whale On The Rail

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Whale_Tail

Ocean creatures are finding small ways to make us question our assumptions about them. We discovered earlier this week that dolphins recognize the whistles of other dolphins they shared a tank with 20 years earlier. That’s a better memory than most middle aged men I know, some of whom can’t remember who they met yesterday. And no, I can’t recall who I’m talking about, specifically.

But you can usually ignore dolphins and other water-dwellers if you stay on land – or so we thought until yesterday. Now it seems the beasts of the deep want to disrupt our daily routines, perhaps as a preview of how it will be once climate change causes the oceans to rise and flood low-lying areas like Manhattan.

Case in point: a story that got a lot of attention yesterday featured a dead shark discovered riding a New York Subway.

This idea of a straphanger Shark is bound to gain currency for a while. Look for cartoons and You Tube videos. Maybe there’s a movie in the works. Oh, wait, that was Sharknado!

Anyone wishing to capitalize on Subway Shark frenzy will have to take the next step by going both bigger and smaller a the same time. I suggest ripping off Dr.Seuss.

We were heading for home on the subway one day
We were too tired to speak. There was nothing to say

It was Sally and me at the back of a train
that smelled fishy and dank, but we didn’t complain.

The car clattered and rattled and squeaked on its track.
The lights flickered a bit. It got bright and then black.

And then darker than pitch. Clearly something was wrong.
While the squeaking we’d heard transformed into a song.

“What’s that noise?” Sally shouted. The deafening trill
became loud as a whistle and two times as shrill.

And then everything stopped – both the train and the sound!
When we got off the floor we both looked all around.

Peering deep in the tunnel – the source of the din –
we saw two giant eyeballs there, peering back in.

“Don’t be scared” said a voice. “I am harmless,” it joked.
“You’re too late,” I replied, for my trousers were soaked.

“I am sorry for that.” He was big. He was pale.
“You can just call me Moby. The Whale on the Rail.”

“He should not be down here,” stammered Sally, to me.
“Because whales belong down in the depths of the sea.”

“That is true,” said the whale. His breath stank of dead fish.
“But as long as I’m here, we can do what you wish.”

“There are games for commuters and whales we can play.”
“If you have a sharp knife and a sea bass to flay.”

“We do not have a knife,” I replied, in a peep.
“That is not a good game. You go back to the deep.”

But the Whale on the Rail only blinked at us twice.
Then he said, “Maybe some other game would be nice.”

“We could play ‘Where’s Your Blowhole?’ he said. “That is fun.”
“Not for us,” shot back Sally. “Because we don’t have one.”

“So you think,” said the whale. At his voice, the car shook.
“But you always find one in the last place you look.”

“The conductor is coming,” I said. “Swim away.”
But the Whale only smiled. “I would much rather play.”

We all know how this ends.

Add a few lines to “The Whale on the Rail.”

Uncategorized

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?

Uncategorized

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?