I caught a cold. Maybe it would be more accurate to say it caught me because I certainly wasn’t chasing it. It morphed into a raging bull of a sinus infection and is threatening bronchitis. So I finally called my doctor today. I’ve got drugs!
Had I not really wanted to go to S. Carolina in a few days to attend a beach wedding and get to see some of my favorite people, I might have suffered in silence for another week or so until this thing clears itself up. Well, not exactly in silence. Between the hacking cough, moans, groans, and complaints of why me, why now, and… well, suffering in silence is not my forte.
Speaking of silence… remember this sound? If you do, you are either an old (but connected) fart or you live in some totally boondocks area. Or you could be younger and remember this as a sort of lullaby because Momma was going online as soon as she could get you to bed!
Boondock is an interesting word. It’s derived from Tagalog bundok, meaning mountain and came into use in the U.S. after WWII. I’m thrilled to learn another Tagolog word that I can remember other than “utot“.
Speaking of smelly — Glenn Beck really let one go when he said that evolution is being forced down our throats because he’s never seen a half-monkey, half person. A few of the more strident “lefty” sites have ridiculed him without really laying out why he is “not even wrong“. Elisheva Hannah Levin is explaining everything clearly in a series of posts. The first two are Glenn Beck’s Monkey Show: Overview and Glenn Beck’s Monkey Show: Not Even Wrong. Check Ragamuffin Studies for the third in the series.
From not even wrong to just plain wrong… Amity Shlaes explains the rules of the game. Will politicians ever learn to play fair?
Heck, politicians have trouble playing in tune at all. They don’t know what the frequency is any more than did Dan Rather’s assailants.
Much has been written about how people can fool you on the internet and that’s certainly true. But I think these are the same people who would try to fool you in person.
But I don’t read enough about the people you meet on the internet who end up being real good friends even if you never meet them in real life face to face. These are real people who enrich my real life with the words they write, the pictures they post, and the good and the bad times they share.
You know who you are. And thank you… thank you.
1. Stupid people abound on both sides of the U.S. partisan divide. The funniest thing is that sometimes their ‘arguments’ are interchangeable to a high degree.
2. A neighbor playing music outdoors is rather pleasant provided that neighbor is at least a block away.
3. I like sitting on the front porch.
4. A front porch should have a ceiling fan and table on which to rest a glass of wine.
5. Our new neighbors across the street park and enter their driveway just like the old neighbors did. Cars back up the driveway and go in the garage. Pickups enter hood first and park in the driveway to the far right.
6. It doesn’t really bother me to share my glass of wine with a small bug or two as long as they don’t stay in there too long. Why is this? A large bug landing in the glass gets it tossed as does one of any size that’s been in there an unidentified length of time. This may be related to the five second rule.
7. Regarding #1, stupidity is not necessarily correlated with educational achievement or the lack thereof. The ability to express stupidity succinctly is.
I mentioned a while back that I’m into a novel-reading phase. I’ve always liked medical, military, cop, crime novels. One of my favorite books and probably my favorite movie is Hunt for Red October. I also like science fiction and westerns. (For what it’s not worth, my 2nd favorite movie is Airplane.)
Considering the genres I like, you know I’ve read some crap. But some of it was fairly well written with believable, if predictable, plots and characters.
I’m also not a very forgiving reader when my quite forgiving tolerance level is not met. An author who churns out a few obvious pot-boilers, takes advantage of his/her reputation by publishing previously unpublishable work, or doesn’t even make a half-assed effort to get well-known technology straight gets stricken permanently from reading list. Tom Clancy finally made that list. It will take a lot for someone to persuade me to read anything new by him again.
And it’s also typical of me that I don’t remember the name of the book that I threw against the wall that put him on my never bother to read again list.
So, I find myself out of town recently with an uncomfortable computer setup and without my stash of reading material. On a trip to the local WalMart (18 miles away) I decide to pick up a novel. I see one by Robin Cook. I vaguely remember the name and reading some of his medical mysteries in the 1990s and earlier. And I wondered why I hadn’t heard of him lately.
Here’s the caution: ALWAYS read the Amazon reviews. If I had, I’d know why I hadn’t heard about him in years and would have not considered buying it. The book I bought – Intervention – garnered 62 (out of 99 total) 1 star reviews. At least one of those reviewers said it got one star because Amazon doesn’t allow zero stars. Several reviewers echoed my thought exactly: The worst book I’ve ever read.
My 3 year old granddaughter visited a fire station today. This is an account of the conversation with her Mom on the way home:
I asked her what she should do if her clothes are on fire, and she said “put on different clothes and put the other ones in the hamper!” When I asked her if she’d like to be a firefighter one day, she said “no thank you, I’m going to be Sleeping Beauty because I already have that dress.”
Now, you must admit there’s a certain practicality in her thinking.
It is for me anyway — it requires thinking!
I cannot quite imagine the work that goes into a large campaign because the one I’ve been working on is for mayor of a very small town. There are no large events to plan, not much travel (gotta get to the county seat occasionally), and only one reporter to deal with. He’s a nice guy who asks questions by mail, and so far the same ones of each candidate.
It’s all very low key although my father is one of four candidates. Yet even in a small town that one thinks they know a bit about, there’s still research and planning to be done. One of the main questions I needed answered was “Why do you want to be mayor?” After that got distilled down to one or two sentences, it was a little easier to put together some campaign rhetoric.
For a small, low-budget campaign, I don’t think we’ve done too badly. There are signs up, there are campaign cards being distributed, newspaper ads are in the works, and we’re trying this social media thing out. The campaign has a Facebook page and email! It will be very interesting to see what kind of response that gets.
Roland Bush for Mayor
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