But I do enjoy reading about interesting personalities, and participating in an organized sport is one way to express your uniqueness. Maybe it’s the pressure of competition that brings interesting qualities to the fore. And for some reason, the sporting world attracts individuals with remarkable names. Especially baseball, where fan and jazz pianist Dave Frishberg was inspired to set to music this list of compelling monikers.
This comes up because I noticed today marks the birthdays of some sports figures from the past who had outstanding names –
And German soccer coach Wolfgang Wolf (who spent five years managing the Wolfsburg Wolves)
British athlete and five-time Wimbledon winner Lottie Dod
All of Lottie Dod’s wins at Wimbledon came against the same player – the imposingly named Blanche Bingley Hillyard.
As an amateur sing-song poet and shameless creator of too many stupid little rhymes, I find this pair irresistible. And of course one of them has a perfect name for this justifiably unappreciated form.
Blanche Bingley Hillyard
Some sports can hinge on state of mind,
like tennis, golf and billiards,
Opponents can get in your head.
ie: Blanche Bingley Hillyard’s.
Though BBH was quite a champ,
(they will not soon forget her),
Each time they played at Wimbledon
Another girl was better.
The focus and the discipline
that Blanche brought to the game
was poised and stately, and it is
reflected in her name.
Lottie Dod
So it’s not fair that winning was
(if tennis has a God)
A major task for BBH.
And fun for Lottie Dod.
For Lottie didn’t practice
or prepare in any way.
She danced around the tennis court
and sang her name all day.
Lottie Dod, Lottie Dod,
Dotty Lottie Dod
Doodly Doodly Doodly dee
Lah dee Lottie Dod.
Beth-Ann sent a link to this video that has been viewed on You Tube well over one million times in the past two days. A baby goat at a petting zoo is in distress. Apparently the goat’s foot is stuck underwater and the animal can’t get out of the pond.
For reasons that will soon become clear, a pig is sent to the rescue.
Some people (and animals) are just good in a crisis. Others (like me), tend to stand around and watch, not knowing what to do.
Researchers have studied crisis situation response and based on their reports most people misjudge how they would respond in an emergency. We all tend to think we’d behave better than we actually do. A more common response is to over-think the situation, resulting in paralysis.
it is obvious that this heroic pig, let’s call him Wilbur, refrained from pre-judging the conditions and simply responded with common sense to the facts as they presented themselves to him.
Goat in trouble. Goat needs a helping push. Let’s swim out there and push the goat.
Not a lot of agonizing there about a possible lawsuit or getting in trouble for jumping in the pond or privacy worries should this wind up on You Tube or that a tabloid photographer would snap and distribute a topless pig photo or any squeamishness at all over possibly swallowing some goat flavored water – the pig simply did what had to be done!
Or maybe the pig thought the goat had found something good to eat and went out there to investigate. Heroism sometimes happens by accident.
A potentially drowning baby goat is not the same thing as Hurricane Katrina, but this is a good opportunity to note that what is left of September is still part of National Preparedness Month.
Of course, if I was a different sort of person, I would have been prepared to observe this several weeks ago!
I wrote to you a little over one month ago with a serious question about the life I had led in the field of politics, and how I felt under appreciated by just about everyone I encountered in that world.
I had just been rejected as a potential vice presidential nominee in favor of someone younger and prettier – and this happened after spending a ton of money in a failed bid to become president. When I wrote to you, I wanted to know if I should walk away from the relentless striving for attention and approval, or quietly position myself to run for some other office, like Senator.
And yet I’m writing to you again because I think you’re one of the few people who takes me seriously.
I’ve just decided to leave politics and take a high paying job in the private sector. This is the right thing for me to do after years on a government salary. The gravy train is at the station!
And yet people are acting like I’m some sort of traitor because I had to quit my unpaid volunteer political job as co-chair of a big campaign. Critics say I’m “jumping ship” and hurting the candidate’s feelings in his time of need.
Trust me, the candidate doesn’t know what it means to have a “time of need” – he’s a super rich guy with a big ego. And frankly, guys like him can be a bit distant and clueless, feelings-wise.
But I’m not running away from my troubles. Now, instead of dealing with just one I’ll get to pal around with a whole bunch of super rich guys with big egos who can be a bit distant and clueless, feelings-wise. Some things never change.
I got into public service to help people, Dr. Babooner. I admit it didn’t always work out that way, but my intentions were good. Like most people, I wanted to be a hero and do something big and memorable. That’s why my new job is going to be so great. I get to sit at a round table!
Growing up as an American child, I knew I could never be one of the REAL Knights of Camelot. But this will be the closest thing to it! We’ve got a whole publicity staff just to the promote the idea that all we do is noble deeds!
If you had this opportunity you would take it too!
So why is everybody being so mean to me about it?
I told P.O.O.R.T.I.M. that he needn’t apologize for taking the money. Everyone needs to pay the bills and people are sometimes mean when they feel jealous, so maybe they just envy you. Getting paid AND getting to be the leader of the roundtable seems like a dream job, but be watchful over how much chain mail and armor they put on you.
That stuff can chafe!
But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?
You know we live in unusual times when the big sex news continues to be topless photos of a hot princess, instead of this – two women in Sweden have received uterus transplants. From their mothers.
Let that sink in.
If the new organs remain healthy and intact, these women will be walking around carrying the wombs that they themselves were carried in. And if they’re able to get pregnant, their children will spring from the
very same fertile ground that mom did. That’s got to be a little eerie.
And how would it feel to the two older mothers? They’re each giving a wonderful gift to their 30+ year old daughters – one young woman lost her uterus to cancer and the other was born without one – but how would you process the thought that your daughter is growing your grandchild in your womb?
I don’t know what manual the 10 Swedish doctors used to perform this operation, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the illustrations were by M.C. Escher.
Hearing the kerfuffle about Mitt Romney’s comments at a supposedly private fundraiser about the freeloading 47%, I was reminded of this ballad about a train wreck. The Wreck of the Old 97 is something that really happened back in late September of 1903. An engineer, Steve Broady, was urged by his superiors to get the mail delivered on time even though he was well behind schedule. The results were disastrous.
Every political candidate who has handlers is constantly under pressure to stay “on message”, even if it means following a rather narrow track. I can only imagine how tempting it is to simply push the throttle forward and feel the wind tousle your beautiful hair!
Here’s the original version of The Wreck of the Old 97.
Well they fed him the numbers for his target percentage
sayin’ “don’t speak this out loud.”
But you can never appeal to the frail 47
They’re a whiney liberal crowd.
So he turned around and said to his hoity toity funders
“We can win it with 53
If we pick up every voter between Lynchburg and Danville
that’s including you and me”
There was someone in the crowd taking pictures with a camera
of the whole off-record speech.
Then he posted it online just to cause a lot of trouble
What a lazy, shiftless leech!
So they backpedaled all day. Every interview on cable
started with that thing he said.
About victims and entitlements and living on the dole
and how cheesecake is not like bread.
So now all you politicians better keep on your message
’til your eyeballs start to burn.
Never say another word about the pampered 47
or your older tax returns.
Edith was widowed in about 1924 with four young children when her husband dropped dead at the age of 36 of a heart attack. Fortunately his life insurance covered the cost of the house, but only that. She survived with the magic she could do with the stove. She cooked for many rich families and made it through the Depression mostly by running a bootleg bakery, “bootleg” in the sense of unlicensed. And, oh, how she could bake.
Edith
She had a son shot down over Germany in WWII and another son came home deaf. When her daughter ended up in a bad marriage and badly crippled from arthritis, she took them into her home, now doing all her magic in a tiny kitchen she had built upstairs. She shared her upstairs bedroom with her two grand daughters, one of whom is my wife.
She was described as always upbeat, giggly, and girlish. In her early fifties she seemed to have developed a sort of mild senility, which made her delightfully, charmingly dingy. I could tell thousands of stories about this, such as the fact she long carried around a piece of paper with my name on it because otherwise she called me Claude. Here are a few stories, in which you will notice forty years of widowhood had made her confused about sex.
My wife, the world’s most beloved human being, was packing for our honeymoon, including all the negligees she had received in her 13 bridal showers. Gramma Edith kept pulling them out of the suitcase and telling her to save them for something special.
She once told my wife not to undress in front of me because one day we may get divorced and then my wife would be walking down the street and see me and say, “Oh, no, I undressed in front of him.” After that she called several times in tears insisting she did not think we would get divorced, including more than once in the middle of the night.
In our poor but fun college years we would go over to the house to wash our clothes and take my mother-in-law for an outing. Edith would fold our clothes and take out and hide all the negligees. So I called up Edith and told her that Sandy was sleeping naked. She demanded that we come right over and get them. She would also hide food for us in the laundry, and once hid butter in my wife’s purse, which fell out of the purse when my wife was paying for groceries on our way home. My wife did not even try to explain. The clerk carefully ignored it, perhaps because my wife was purchasing such a modest amount of basic stuff.
Edith once ran short of apples for her famous apple pie, so she substituted watermelon pickles. She did not think we would notice. She made a famous torte, the recipe for which she stubbornly took to her grave.
Generation Two: Mugs, the Crip
Marguerite became pregnant at age 19 and rushed into a bad marriage, giving birth in March of 1940 to my wife Sandy. Four years later after giving birth to a second daughter, she developed severe rheumatoid arthritis, which over the next 42 years dissolved the bones in her hands and feet and gave her terrible pain. But she refused to let it limit her and not once in anyone’s memory ever complained. She went to everything she could at the Courage Center, where she hung out with the other “crips,” as they liked to call themselves.
Mugs
She once took an assertiveness class, from which she was excused for her assertiveness. In my college years she spent many months at the U of M having her knees and hips replaced, among the first to have the operations. She and I had lunch together every day while she was there and became close friends. She spent the rest of her time there seeking out those who needed an encouraging friend.
It was my—is “pleasure” the word—to do her funeral, at which I told many of other inspiring stories about her I am not telling here.
Generation Three: Sandy, the Most Beloved Being on the Planet
In my wife’s yearbook,despite a very difficult childhood, it said by her picture “Everyone wants to be like Sandy.” Everyone loves my wife. Everyone. Loves her.
Sandy
Our friend Lori recently went to one of my wife’s many doctors and told the doctor that she knew Sandy. The doctor acknowledged that she should not talk about another patient but told Lori how Sandy inspires everyone in the office, that after Sandy had been there no one complains about anything for the next few days. My wife goes there with her progressing lupus and five other illnesses and greets everyone by name in her perky manner. Sandy asks about their joys and problems, about which she has learned over her many visits. The doctor has to argue with my wife to tell her symptoms because then she would be complaining.
On Saturday I responded to a last minute request for volunteers at Minnesotans United for All Families. Since I am recovering from laryngitis, I was ideally suited for the menial gluing and stapling task at the Loring Park office.
After several hours of sign-making I high-fived my young supervisor (his initiative not mine) and headed down Hennepin Avenue to my car. I noticed some money on the sidewalk and bent down to pick it up. There were two crumpled $50 bills!
What could you do with a pair of Fifties?
I was across from the Basilica without a soul in sight. There was nobody who had just passed the spot in either direction and most of the storefronts were empty. I picked up the money and (too) rapidly decided that with possession being 9/10 of the law, the hundred dollars were obviously mine.
I am very fortunate that my life is comfortable enough that I can get along without the money, still I needed to think if it belonged in my pocket or elsewhere. I’ve found money before and never even think twice before putting nickels and quarters in my purse.
I decided that since the only reason I was in the neighborhood was to help Minnesotans United defeat the hurtful marriage amendment, my most appropriate action would be to donate it to the organization. I turned around and went back to hand the money to the staff person processing contributions. I wish she’d been a little more excited about my lucky find.
I’ve since told the story to a number of folks and have truly enjoyed the enthusiasm shown in their plotting to allocate the windfall and their joy in the serendipity of my discovery.
Today’s post comes from perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden of Wendell Wilkie High School.
Hey Mr. C.,
Well, we’re back. It’s been a couple of weeks already and I’m feeling a little down because it’s all so familiar now. Being a sophomore is the pits – you don’t feel that freshman level of excitement and you’re still a long way from having any of the senior class coolness factor. I come to school every day with a dark cloud hanging over my head. I feel invisible, so I act out in class and get sent to the office. Ho hum, it’s all so familiar and NOT scary. When you’re a sophomore, you know the routine and you’re nothing is new – this must be what it’s like to have the same job for, like, 30 years. Blah.
Not like I know how it really feels to hold a job. I guess I just wasn’t born at the right time for that.
Mr. Boozenporn says there’s a huge demographic shift coming, though, when all the baby boomers will retire and suddenly the jobs will open up and (he says) we’ll find out that we’re not trained for the many good paying openings that will be available because we’ve been too busy just farting around in his class.
But from what my dad tells me, just farting around is a real description of the actual responsibilities of an honest-to-goodness job, and his boss has it.
is that true? Can you get away with stuff once you’re on the payroll?
Everything I see on TV says pretty much the opposite – that people are getting fired left and right all the time for no reason at all, especially if they work for Donald Trump.
Anyway, I’m kind of excited about all the cool jobs that will pop up when you and your old friends finally go into the nursing home and get out of our way. And just think – when all those good paying jobs get claimed by the brightest minds of my generation, who’s going to be left to do the crummy, low paying work of fluffing pillows and changing bedpans for the likes of you?
I’ll tell you who – it’ll be the kids who farted around in class. So tell Mr. Boozenporn to let me and my friends goof off! It may seem like we’re just being jackasses, but actually we’re practicing to be your caretakers!
Sincerely,
Your friend,
Bubby Spamden.
I find it hard to argue with Bubby’s logic, strange as it is. His poor scholarship and inability to resist peer pressure may be the only thing things left in this world that bode well for my comfortable retirement. But first they have to let him graduate.
In June one morning I rode my bike through the industrial park and saw an arresting sight. In a large parking lot about 75 cars were parked near the entrance to a manufacturing plant. In a distant corner of the lot were two cars parked side-by-side. One was a perfectly maintained BMW Z4. The other was an old Dodge Dart, a rust-bucket rattletrap. I spent the next couple of miles guessing how these two cars ended up in their shared isolated position.
I could imagine several stories.
I forgot about it until two days later when I rode by to see the same placement of cars. This time it struck me that Pixar would make a movie out if it, in the style of Lady and the Tramp. The two cars would be in the alley behind an import garage sucking on radiator hoses simmered in 5-10 motor oil flavored with herbs de Peugeot as they sipped on chilled canisters of penetrating oil. Their union would result in six bouncy little Vespas and a mo-ped.
Three days later, I rode by the scene again. This time I imagined a murder mystery in the style of Three Bags Full or Thereby Hangs a Tail but as seen through the headlights of a car, not the eyes of sheep or a dog. Using pure German rationalism, the BMW would solve the mysterious murder of a VW beetle by a black stretch limousine. The Dart would be the BMW’s snitch in the style of Stuart Margolin playing Angel in The Rockford Files. They were holding a meeting in the parking lot for the Dart to tell the BMW that the VW was an industrial spy.
Circumstances kept me from riding by the parking lot for more than six weeks. But now the BMW was alone and has been on every ride since. Hmmm? In fantasy or real life, I bet there’s a story to be told.
I put up some new perch racks for my chickens. This latest batch of chickens never seemed to get the hang of them and they kind of just huddle up in a corner on the floor; easy pickings for some raccoon or coyote.
So lately I’ve tried to get them using the perch. Chickens don’t listen very well. And they sure as heck don’t ‘herd’.
There are a variety of perches. Wonder what sort of perches I provided?
Here’s a hint. Not this:
Not this either:
My perches are simple 2×4’s. About as basic as a tree.
My older siblings could tell you stories about chickens in trees. My brother had to climb up and get them down. My sister had to collect the eggs. They both hated their jobs. At least my chickens don’t roost in trees. Much.
They do hang out in a lilac bush during the day.
So, the first night I simply chased the chickens over to the perch. They don’t really settle down and roost until night so it was dark out when I decided to do this. In hindsight I should have told my wife what I was up to. The chickens were greatly upset by my meddling and it sounded to Kelly like a massacre down in the chicken coop. Five nights in a row now I’ve poked, prodded, chased, herded, carried, lugged and cajoled those chickens to the roost.
And they still haven’t figured it out.
The White Rock breed is very quiet and I can pick them up and tuck them under my arm and put them on the perch. The Black Australorp do NOT like to be picked up and they make a real fuss about it. The Silver Laced Wyandotte have no sense of balance. I’ve been picking the chickens up and carrying them over to the perch and I place them on it.
One of those black ones lept straight up, smacked into my face and broke both nosepieces off my glasses. They were broken before and I have super glued them back on twice now. But this time I couldn’t find the nosepieces. They’re down in the dirt and feathers and manure and….
Well, I didn’t look too hard.
I have been trying to help these birds, and have been handsomely rewarded for it. A couple weeks ago it was a stick up my nose. Today it’s broken glasses.
It’s quite an ordeal. I’m hoping they learn soon. Or one of us should anyway.
They say no good deed ever goes unpunished.
When has this been true for you?
Trail Baboon 