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Summer Bummer

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I’m embarrassed to admit it – I had forgotten all about perennial sophomore Bubby Spamden until a surprise e-mail showed up late last night!

Hey Mr. C.,

How’s your summer?

Mine started out cool because I haven’t been able to find a job (again). And that means long days at home in the basement, playing video games with my buddies Skeeter and Doug until we can’t stand it, which means we play for a very very long time.

My folks complain and roll their eyes and say we’re wasting our brains, but I think it’s really a good thing to play video games non-stop. Our hand-eye coordination gets to be super good, and we learn to cooperate or at least not kill each other, which we don’t, mostly.

I mean we do, but only on the screen.

Anyway, they say we’re getting dumb and violent. But have they looked at what’s been happening with our thumb strength? I’ll bet unemployed American teenagers have got the quickest and most muscular thumbs in the world, by far.

Kids with strong thumbs are important in history. There was that Dutch kid who used his to plug a hole in the dike. And don’t forget Little Jack Horner! If not for his thumb, that Christmas Pie would still be all full of plums!

And what about in modern times? Today, thumbs are what you use for texting. And texting is communication. And communication is survival!

What if I saw a logging truck rolling out of control down a steep mountain, and the only way to stop it in time was to text for help? Somebody your age would take forever to send that message, but I could do it in seconds! So maybe playing video games all the time is the best thing we could be doing. Our thumbs could save the world. You never know!

Anyway, that’s not why I wrote.

I wrote because my cool summer has turned awful, and I blame the Governor of Minnesota and those legislative leaders. What a bunch of goofballs! Just because they didn’t get their work done, tens of thousands of state workers stayed home this week.

Do you know what that means? Hundreds of thousands of state workers’ kids now suddenly have to deal with mom or dad or BOTH hanging around all day, saying fun-killing stuff like “why don’t you clean your room?” and “You cook the dinner tonight” and calling down the stairs with rude, disrespectful comments, like “Time to mow the lawn!” and “Get outside and take a walk for God’s sake!”

This is ruining summer. I’m serious! If I have to go outside, do you know what kind of trouble I’ll get into? Me neither! It’s scary.

Please, I’m begging Governor Macy’s and all those taxophobic legislators – get your work done so Minnesota’s teenagers can get furloughed parents out of their hair and back to work!

I’ll pay you to settle it up. Seriously. I’ve got access to lots of cash ever since my folks stopped trusting banks and began stashing their savings in the dresser drawer. Piles of money – all yours to balance the budget. And you don’t have to call it a tax. How about a “Delinquency Suppression Fee”.

Your pal,
Bubby

I’m worried that Bubby is willing to steal money out of his parents’ dresser drawer to help fund state government, and that he doesn’t know the name of the department store that gave the Governor his millionaire status. Difficult times can drive desperate people to say confusing things that they don’t really mean.

What was your worst summer vacation ever?

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Charges Dropped Against Charging Bear

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The unfortunate encounter between two Yellowstone National Park hikers who “did everything right” and a grizzly bear who was just “protecting her cubs” ended in the death of one of the hikers. That’s sad. But the Park Service is probably right in its decision to not destroy the bear in question, since its behavior marks the attack as defensive.

Officials called it a ‘one in three million’ occurrence. Literally. It turns out that 3.6 million people visit Yellowstone each year, so let’s hope this is the only one. The Christian Science Monitor pointed out that bear population numbers and the number of park visitors are both on the upswing. Unexpected meetings are bound to increase. Two people were killed by bears near Yellowstone last year.

How can we adapt to defuse these dangerous situations?

The married couple spotted the bear and her cubs and retreated. They turned their backs on the animals and continued down the path the way they had come. When they checked to see the bears reaction, she was already charging them.

Clearly the hikers’ actions in this case were not enough to get the bear to see that they intended no threat. What part of “backing down the trail” don’t you understand? All of it, I suppose. Wild grizzlies just aren’t attuned to the signals we send. I think I would have done exactly the same thing as these two hikers did, probably with the same results.

The man who was killed told his wife to run when the bear charged them, but park rangers say it was her decision to play dead that probably saved her life. The bear attacked the man first, inflicted the fatal wounds, then turned its attention to the woman, picking her up by her backpack before dropping her and leaving.

She must have done a convincing job, though I can only imagine being crazy with fear in that situation. How does a person stay still and limp while being picked up by a grizzly? But with a bear that’s able to run 35 miles per hour, this may be the only reasonable reaction to a defensive attack.

And yet playing dead is not a natural behavior for humans, nor is it something we teach in our schools. Too bad. There’s another important skill that has been sacrificed to our obsession with reading and math.

Still, as Tim Pawlenty would tell us, if you can find it on Google then the government doesn’t need to do it. And wouldn’t you know – there is a small but earnest “how to play dead” industry online.

The best advice I’ve seen so far has to do with breathing – you should do it, but not too much. Also:

* When people die, they do not always have tongue sticking out one corner of their mouth. Try to avoid it.

* Do not smile, even if the people around you are laughing and saying stupid things.

Yes, smiling is a dead giveaway for any ‘playing dead’ player. We all know the dead have nothing to grin about, and do not generally ‘get’ punch lines, even obvious ones.

Perhaps we will, through brutal experience, develop this survival strategy until we are on par with the wily possum. But how many millions of years will it take before evolution gives us a grizzly who will charge you, pick you up and drop you, then tell a good one-liner, just to make sure?


Do you know a joke that’s guaranteed to get a laugh?

Songs, Uncategorized

In Dublin’s Fair City

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… Where girls are so pretty,
I first set my eyes on sweet Molly Malone!

So goes a famous old Irish song, done here on You Tube by The Dubliners.

I thought of this song when I read yesterday that the spread of Zebra Mussels across Lake Minnetonka appears to be steady and unstoppable. Infestation is probably inevitable, though there have been efforts to slow the advance of this invasive species by encouraging boat owners to drain, clean and dry their boats before moving from affected waters to clean ones.

Ah, well.

At least when Minnetonka’s docks and shores are completely encrusted with sharp shells, we can sing to our new overlords about their relentless advance.

I love to go boating,
A-drifting and floating,
On summertime days in the suburbs out west.
The lakes get quite rowdy.
They’re frothy and crowdy.
With Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!

Alive, Alive-O! Alive, Alive-O!
They’ve got Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!

On Lake Minnetonka,
They drop so much stray junk ya
can’t even see water beneath the debris.
The piles are fantastic
They’re discarded plastic
And Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!

Alive, alive-O! Alive, Alive-O!
They’ve got Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!

So thanks to the sportsmen,
The starboard-and-portsmen,
Who go lake-to-lake with their vessels un-drained.
They’re spreading and trading,
Wholesale propagating
Those Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!

Alive, alive-O! Alive, Alive-O!
They’ve got Zebra Striped Mussels, Alive, Alive-O!

Do you pick up hitchhikers?

Uncategorized

Ask Dr. Babooner

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Dear Dr. Babooner,

Show trials really turn me on.

I feel horrible about it because the court cases I like the most always revolve around tawdry acts supposedly committed by selfish, despicable people who display no remorse. When one of these trials comes along, I totally immerse myself in the case. I read everything and watch live coverage on TV. I think about it constantly and can talk about it non-stop. Normal people cannot be around me until the jury rules and the case is over. I become intolerable.

My wife says this is typical behavior for a miserable, self-loathing creature with an insatiable hunger to feel better about himself. My fascination with accused wrongdoers is, she says, a coping mechanism. By pickling my brain in the sour brine that overflows from the jars of an endless string of black-hearted individuals, I am trying to convince myself that I am, by comparison, fairly normal.

I tell her that I am passionate about justice, and thoughtlessly spouting all this amateur psychology makes her look dumb. I may not be a perfect person, but I am far from being obsessed with my own shortcomings. I do, however, feel that wrongdoers should be thoroughly and mercilessly punished.

That’s why, when I believe a person is guilty and a jury lets them go in spite of the evidence, I fall into a terribly deep funk until some measure of payment is exacted. After the Casey Anthony verdict yesterday, I forced myself to sit in an ice-filled bathtub until my toes turned blue.

But that’s not the worst of it. For a year after O.J. Simpson was acquitted, I lined my underwear with crushed glass and went barefoot every day.

“More evidence of a bizarrely twisted self image,” my wife said.

“Just trying to restore some balance to the world.” was my answer. But I understand why my wife would find me to be a human smash-up, terribly moody and impossible to live with.

Oddly, she says I’m not so bad.

Dr. Babooner, why is she lying to me?

Sincerely,
Unworthy.

I told Unworthy that it is pointless to beat yourself up just because somebody else thinks you’re self-loathing. So what if you are? I don’t think that reflects negatively on you! A lot of decent people are overly critical of themselves. By constantly telling yourself you are a black-hearted wretch who deserves to suffer Hell on Earth, you demonstrate a strong preference that the world should be better than it is. Your self-directed pessimism is a sign of outward optimism. Stand up and be proud of your inwardly directed hatred!

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

Uncategorized

Greatest Show on Earth

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Today is the birthday of the American showman and promoter, P.T. Barnum, in 1810.

Barnum had a genius for marketing anything people were willing to gawk at, whether it was a blind old woman, a dwarf, an elephant, a monkey head sewn to the tail of a fish, or a Swedish soprano.

Part of Barnum’s gift was to recognize that people need a story and a powerful name to spark their interest. Thus the blind old woman was amplified to majestic proportions, and in Barnum’s world was presented as not just an old woman, but George Washington’s former nurse. To make the math work, her age was said to be 161 years.

The dwarf was also age enhanced, transformed by Barnum from a 5 year old to an 11 year old, and re-named “General Tom Thumb”. Though he was actually from Connecticut, Barnum advertised him as being brought from overseas “at great expense.”

The elephant was dubbed “Jumbo” and actually was brought from overseas at great expense, and proved to be a huge moneymaker for Barnum, only to die tragically in a head on collision with a locomotive. The monkey/fish concoction was billed as “The Feejee Mermaid”, and soprano Jenny Lind won hearts as “The Swedish Nightingale”.

Barnum is said to have been an advocate of “humbug” as a useful tool for promoting various acts, meaning it’s OK to exaggerate and tell outright lies if the public gets its money’s worth and enjoys the show.

He made a lot of money and did extravagant things with it, including building a palace in Bridgeport, a Xanadu he named “Iranistan” (really!). Jenny Lind claimed that seeing an image of Iranistan is what made her want to come to America to be put on display by Barnum – his success was evident from the majesty of his home.
Never mind that Iranistan burned to the ground 9 years after he built it.

Barnum would feel right at home in the world of 2011, and would thrive online, a vast kingdom made up almost entirely of humbug. In fact, everything I know about P.T. Barnum came directly from Wikipedia. How much is true? Who cares?

Does the world need promoters?

Uncategorized

Taking the Long Way

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Happy Independence Day!

To celebrate freedom by staying home from work on a Monday must feel especially sweet, unless you happen to be an employee of the State of Minnesota. In that case, the open ended-ness of your long weekend would tend to put a damper on those feelings of jubilation. Trust me on that.

Personally, I’m reporting for work today without complaint, because I have to, and because it’s delightful to have a job.

And so we will observe the day with picnics, parades and fireworks, though some might choose to celebrate with a woodworking project.

Here’s an artifact that is, without a doubt, an object of great significance. Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence on this lap desk of his own design. A compact and tidy thing, it folds out to present a felt covered workspace that sits at a comfortable angle for writing.

And yes, you have to do your scribbling longhand. There’s no keyboard, kiddies.

But it IS portable. Jefferson was a visionary, and somehow he could see that we would want to be able to plop down and put our thoughts to parchment anyplace, anytime. You can store your writing implements in the handy divided slide-out drawer. And it locks, so people can’t steal your ideas when you drift up to the counter for another caramel macchiato grande latte.

The Thomas Jefferson lap desk appears simple enough to be a basement project for the at-home craftsman, and some have tried. I can only guess that the various moving parts, tight fitting drawer and old-world corner joints defeated a few amateurs along the way. Just like writing the Declaration itself, the creation of an enduring piece of art is a lot harder than it looks.

One of the greatest things about America is that somebody else is ready to sell you that thing you can’t make for yourself – and there’s a price range so you have a chance to find one that suits your budget.

You can pay just over $1,900 (with shipping) for a Jefferson Lap Desk, though you’d think at that lofty price point it might be more effective to deliver the whole package for $1,776. Others are available at $795 and $600, fountain pens not included.

Once the desk arrives, open it up and conceive a nation (in liberty). Feel free to start over as often as you like. As long as you’re creating some founding documents, try to include a few words of advice for future leaders in regard to the whole notion of a debt ceiling.

If you’re like me, you’ll have to figure in the ancillary costs of dribbling ink on your good shirt.

When do you take the time to write it out longhand?

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What Government?

37 Comments

Good discussion on Friday about admiring those you don’t agree with. Thanks to Clyde for the thoughtful guest post, and for bringing up Jon Hassler, whose writing provides a comfortable place for so many readers.

And so far, so good on the state government shutdown.

At least as far as my personal comfort is concerned, and what else matters? I’ve already got money, food and good health. Why should I worry about suddenly absent services that only other people need, especially if they’re people I don’t know and can’t see?

A friend forwarded a video for those who adhere to the old Ronald Reagan saying –
“Government is not the solution to our problems, government IS the problem.”

I can’t deny that government is sometimes inefficient and bureaucratic. But unnecessary?
It’s handy to have someone or something to blame for all the problems you see. But you may not want to wish it away entirely.

Where is the most lawless, unregulated place you’ve visited?

The Baboon Congress

Mutual Admiration/Opposition Society

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Today’s guest post comes from Clyde.

I am a devoted re-reader of the 1974 book Staggerford by the Minnesota writer Jon Hassler.

I admire the honest but still satirical image of the professional life of a secondary English teacher, which Mr. Hassler once was. It has a delightfully real and satirically-portrayed faculty party and faculty meeting. Also, equally honest is the portrayal of the sad lives some students are forced to endure. As a lucky side-light for me, I have met the teachers who were the models for two of the characters in the book. He got them exactly right.

But when I re-read it every two years or so, I more and more admire the character Agatha McGee, the main character’s land lady. Miss McGee is old-fashioned and conservative, in the true sense of the term of one who does not want things to change, ever. She is a devout Catholic who still uses her ancient Latin Missal. When she passes the peace in church, a modernism she resents, she says “Pax.” She is a sixth-grade Catholic school teacher who dresses and runs her classroom the way teachers did in the 1920’s. She is dark and broods over rain, sin, and the moral laxity of modern poetry. She later becomes the main character in two subsequent books which have never quite worked for me.

As a dedicated change agent in education, and one open to modern adaptations in religion, I should dislike her. But instead I am drawn to her and the clarity and wit of Hassler’s descriptions of her. I suspect he feels a similar contradiction in his attitude towards her. It is the strength of her convictions, her underlying humanity, and her take-charge-in-a-leadership-vacuum ability which so strongly affect me.

I hope I am a better liberal, well, moderate liberal, for having met her.

When have you come to respect, admire, or even love someone, real or fictional, whose opinions or attitudes contradict your own?

Poems

Budget Deadlock Haiku

61 Comments

So much has already been said about a possible Minnesota government shutdown tomorrow, I hesitate to add even a single word to the flood of opinion. The Commentary River is well over its banks and some good people may lose their homes while familiar words swirl around them.

Maybe we need to impose strict verbal austerity measures.

Use your talking points.
Three lines, five, seven and five.
No new syllables!

Gold Horses look down
No one can clean their stable.
Mountains of manure!

My closed state park is
Beautiful without me there
Or so I suppose.

Government is the
problem that cannot be solved
with just a hammer.

Here’s a compromise.
You can adopt my viewpoint
Any time you like.

Uncategorized

Best Vacation Ever

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Thanks to the Sherrilee, Renee, and Beth-Ann, the guest bloggers who kept the conversation rolling while I was enjoying a long weekend in northern Minnesota.

It was a wonderful time to be away – even the mostly rainy day was delightful. And I learned about perspective! There is a proper way to record the events when you are catching impossibly tiny fish.

Pose like this ...

... not like this!

Summer, 2011 is turning out to be wonderfully green and lush. If you were lucky enough to not flattened by a tornado in North Minneapolis or submerged by a river in Minot, the weather has probably been pretty fair for you. Still, it is an upper Midwesterner’s obligation to complain bitterly about whatever prominent feature the climate is projecting. In this case, it’s the outrageous amount of rain and the far-too-cool temperatures, though the truth is that we are blessed to have enough moisture and something less than blistering heat.

For those who would like to experience a truly harsh environment, I suggest you book your passage as soon as it becomes possible to visit an asteroid.

This would be the vacation of a lifetime, if by vacation you mean a bleak and frightening experience that feels endless. NASA has sent a probe named Dawn to spend a year with Vesta, an asteroid that orbits our sun. Like some of those exotic vacation resorts you’ve chosen and then regretted, we don’t know very much about Vesta. Even the brochure is puzzling – this line-up of all the best known features makes Vesta’s amenities look like an assortment of blurry potatoes.

But they have sun there (or we wouldn’t be able to see it), so let’s go! I think I can see a pool in the third image from the top left, and is that the golf course in the fourth picture from the right, bottom row? I think it is, and it looks like there are no trees to get in the way of all the perfect, lo-gravity shots I plan to hit.

Fun!

Describe a vacation destination that was much different than you imagined.