Kid Myths

There are certain myths that get passed down from generation to generation. These are kid myths, not adult myths. I know I’ve never perpetuated these myths and I can never figure out how they have survived as long as they have. Of the several I will focus on only a few for the purpose of keeping this short for those of us with equally short attention spans.

Have you ever heard the myth of what happens if you peal a golf ball apart? The myth is that the strands of rubber bands under the plastic shell are wrapped so tightly and even more tightly as you get near the center that they may explode when the outer pressure is lessened. To make it worse the core of every golf ball is an acid and when that gets on you, well you are a goner. And never throw a golf ball into a fire. The explosion has been known to level city blocks.

How about the myth that if you make a funny face your face may stick in that position forever? It was said that the old man that lived next to the school I attended, that happened to have his mouth stuck in a combo smile/grimace position didn’t heed this warning and he was a victim of this malady.

Finally for today, what about the myth of quick sand? This is a big concern among kids. Every time a kid encounters mud there is always the fear that they will be sucked into a murky abyss. To make it even worse there is the myth of slow sand which is equally inescapable as quick sand; however it takes much longer to suck you in making it a much more terrifying death. And there is a bottom of each quick sand pit. It is like a grain hopper filled with the bodies of generations of kids and their pets.

Do you have any kid myths that need some exposure?

Chicken Tractor

Yesterdays post brought forward a couple questions as to exactly what a chicken tractor is. It is basically a penned in yard on wheels or skids and it often involves a coop as well. Every day, depending on size you can manually drag or tow the chicken tractor with a lawn tractor to a new location where the chickens can scratch in the dirt and eat greenery.

I don’t use one because the size I would need to house 21 chickens would be enormous. They would also turn the ground into a wasteland within a couple hours. For now I’m much better off letting them roam the acreage where they can get a very diverse diet between the horse stall and the woods and the lawn the gardens and the swamp.

It is the diverse diet that makes my hens eggs so much better than anything available in stores.

Crouching Tigers, Hiding Chickens

The evening routine around here starts around sun-down. I do muck out the horse stalls, fill their water troughs, put out hay and feed, collect any eggs the chickens may have laid in their feed troughs and then I bring in the horses from the pasture.

Then I move onto the chickens where I collect the eggs, fill their water and their feeders and throw some kitchen scraps inside the yard of the Super-Max to lure them in for the night. I do a count and lock them in.

I did all this on Thursday night. It had been a rather nice day, but right at sun-down a rain squall moved in so I got wet. When I got into Super-Max I found that three Buff Orpingtons, two Barred Rocks and one Silver Laced were missing. There should always be four of each breed and Blue, the rooster. There were a lot a lot of hens missing. My heart sank. I looked all around and called for them. I went into the house and got a flash light and I poked a beam under every deck and out building. I searched the thickets and around stumps. I could not find the six missing hens.

I wondered if a family of coyotes wandered through nabbing them, but I saw no feathers or tracks in the mud. I had heard nothing and I know I had seen all four Buff Orpingtons on my porch looking in my living-room window just an hour earlier.

I had hoped the rain squall caught them off guard and they took shelter somewhere. I wasn’t looking forward to the option of restricting their free ranging during the day or building a chicken tractor to move them to a new location every day.

Just moments ago I was sitting here in my living room at 8:00am and two of the Buffs showed up on my porch. I put on my boots and went outside and the other hens out on the lawn. They weren’t killed, but hollered up somewhere for the night. I’m glad the local raccoons didn’t discover their hideout.

Base 11

OK, any Math Heads out there? The Arabic numerals we use is called Base 10, which means once you go above the number 9 you need to place a digit in front and proceeded going from zero to nine again. We all know how it works.

Now what I’d like to know is what would the symbol for the number 10 look like if our system was based upon Base 11 and wouldn’t the word Base 10 mean Base Eleven?

W

I wonder about the letter W. It isn’t two U’s at all. It is more like a double V. Besides U is a vowel and W is only a vowel rarely along with Y. I’m all for the letter W; some of my favorite words include it, but I don’t think it should be called a Double-U. No more than E should be called an F with a base, or a q ba called an O with a penis, or an X should be called Crossed I’s.

Chickens Know What They Like

Chickens are just weird, which I guess is a good thing. I built them the Super Max coop to keep them safe. Inside the coop are five nest boxes custom made to specifications the chicken experts all agree upon as the best design. They do lay eggs in the boxes, but when I let them out every day to free range they make their rounds. Occasionally I’ll find an egg here and there but they’ve discovered a new favorite laying spot. They love to go into one of the horse stalls and lay eggs in one of the horse feeders. Fortunately my horses aren’t egg eaters, but I do have check before putting their horse food in there.

Go To Goggo

In the quest of a more fuel efficient transportation without the loss of any luxury, which seems odd to me, the auto industry came up with the hybrid. If they were really serious they should start producing Goggomobiles again.

The Goggomobile was a Bavarian automobile manufactured by Glas Auto. Glas Auto was later taken over by BMW. One could buy for a price between $800 and $1500. It had a 15 HP engine and boasted of fuel consumption at 70 miles per gallon. There were 219,531 sedans and 66,511 coupés built from 1955 to 1969. Between 1957 and 1961 some 700 sports cars known as Darts, not to be confused with the Dodge Dart, were produced.



One may wonder why not a Smart Car? Weighing in at 1800 pounds, the Smart Car is twice the weight of the Goggo, it’s maximum speed is 90MPS nearly double that of the Goggo, however the fuel efficiency of the Smart Car is only 31 MPG where the Goggo got 70MPG.

I know you are probably going to tell me about all the safety and pollution stuff that kills any chance that it will ever have improved fuel efficiency. But you can still find Goggo’s to buy out there. Wouldn’t it be cool to drive one?

Shocking!

It is always interesting when a media darling falls from grace and exposes themselves as just a common human with faults like the rest of us. Every year you can count on at least one person falling every month. In recent months we had Tiger Woods, David Letterman, just about every politician in South Carolina. Think about the long list of others: Bill Clinton, Marv Albert, Elliot Spencer, Jimmy Swagert, David Copperfield, Gary Hart, Pee Wee Herman. I’m surprised we are even surprised by this sort of stuff anymore.

Back in the old days scandal was so much more innocent. Sure there were people like Fatty Arbuckle that had their careers ruined over big stuff, but the innocence I am talking about is events like what happened to Uncle Don.

Uncle Don was a radio host for a children’s radio show. Don was really popular and on the air six-days a week. One day after the show ended an engineer neglected to turn off his microphone and Uncle Don was heard to say, "There, I hope that'll hold the little bastards."

Some say this took place on WOR in New York in 1939. Though Snopes.com tries and tries to shoot holes in this event ever actually happening, my mother remembers it clearly, and I recall hearing a bloopers record with the event back in the 60’s when I was a kid.

It is so strange that things like that shocked the masses, and here I sit wondering why they still bleep John Stewart ever he uses the “F” word. I mean, everyone knows what he is saying, so what’s the BFD? If I may quote another historic shocker, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” about the words that are used as long as the grammar is correct.

Sick Day XXXII

I am sick of people that go into long boring detail about a dream they’ve had. Worse than that I’m sick of people that go into long detail about a movie or a TV show they say. But what really make me sick is when someone goes into every intimate detail about some food they ate especially when you know their favorite cuisine is wherever there is a all you can eat buffet and they won't attend an event unless someone is feeding them. Rat Bastards and Rat Bitches!

Counting Snakes

I know someone that swears that snakes can count and I have to agree with him. His house has one of those underground water meters out on his lawn. Somehow the meter reader didn’t fully close the lid after taking a reading. A momma garter snake moved in and gave birth to a dozen baby snakes. My friend was out on his lawn and saw the mama snake scurrying out of the semi closed lid. He opened the lid in her absence and found the dozen or so snakes.

Though this was the perfect place for snakes to live, he thought it would be better if he relocated them to a place that they would not be disturbed. He built a box similar in size and dug a hole in the ground to bury it. He placed some leaves and dirt in the box.

When the mother snake returned to feed her youngsters he gently removed all of them and relocated them to the new box. They seemed to settle in nicely, but after a short while the mother snake was out of the box making a bee line for the water meter which was now closed. She frantically slithered around and over the now closed lid. She was very upset, so my friend returned to the water meter and opened it back up and there inside he realized that he had missed one baby snake. He gently picked it up and took it to the new box along with its mother.

That mother snake knew exactly how many babies she had. This is how we know that snakes can count.

The Wind

Now that we are hopefully nearing the end of our windy season I want to relay a wind story to those of you that never experience the type of wind we have here. When I lived back east, if we had winds of 50MPH we thought the world was going to end. Here we don’t even notice the wind until it gets over 70MPH.

I once heard a story from someone that lives on the Central Oregon Coast. He told me of his neighbor who has a house on the dunes overlooking the beach. The neighbor was burning logs in his fireplace on a windy day. His wife came home and opened the front door the ensuing wind that came through the door lifted the logs out of the fireplace and right up the chimney and shot them like a cannon out onto the beach.

That pretty much explains our windy season here on the Oregon Coast.

Show and Tell

Continuing the conversation of mass communication to people we don’t even know… It was the development of the Internet and various news groups that lead the way for the newest wave of communication with those we never met. From there developed the forums and chat rooms that attracted like minded people that were involved in the same topic, lifestyle and vernacular.

Unless one was a regular contributor to these forums one would never really know who was reading their stuff. Eventually it became more personal when people started blogging, however trackable mass communication didn’t come around until the advent of social networks such as Myspace, Facebook and Twitter where people sign up to read the junk you write. One can gather a fan-base at Youtube where not only your writing is reviewed, but so are your video skills. These places are where you acquire friends and friends of friends that you may communicate with. Often these friends are people you have never met and will probably never meet. With my Facebook account associated with this blog I have never met 18 of the 31 people that are my FB Friends.

The Internet make world-wide communication possible and a lot of people know how to tap into that communication flow. The cool thing is that it costs little if anything and the training in minimal if anything at all.

The need to communicate with strangers is really strong with people today, especially with the kids. I was recently speaking with a school teacher and she told me that the kids in her class are able to Tweet messages with their devices inside their pockets. They can’t see the keyboard, but they can feel it with their thumb. They are able to log in, compose a message and send it without ever removing their device from their pockets. Now that is cool and it demonstrates the need and determination to communicate better than anything else I can think of.

.... . .-.. .-.. ---

I figure it must be because all humans through the years have had their own Lonely Hearts Clubs. We are communicators like bull frogs at the pond. We send out our calls, and sometimes someone in the distance replies. Back in the primitive times it was the sound of the drum that communicated with those far away, but in the early 20th century humans progressed to armature radio and Morse Code.

Back in the early days many careers required the knowledge and use of Morse Code. Anyone in the communication field needed to know it and be able to deal with code at the rate of 40 upwards to 100 words per minute. This code was used by nearly all radio engineers, Western Union, Railroad stations and anything to do with shipping. There were civilians that also mastered code to qualify for their amateur radio license. CW communications were the main stay of how to communicate with many people you’ve never met.

The interesting about code was that each person hammering out code on a key had a distinctive flare. A well trained ear could determine not only who was sending the code, but also the region in which they lived. It was called the Swing and it is best described as an accent. I’ve heard examples of several different swings and even to the untrained the differences were discernable.

To become good at code was an effort. It was like learning another language or a musical instrument, but with communication it was easy to make a major mistake. One had to constantly practice The more that other forms of communication became available the fewer people learned code. The U.S. Coast Guard stopped monitoring Morse code transmissions in 1995 when their use in sending distress calls had been almost entirely superseded by automated systems using satellite relay. There are still people on the CWs coding like the good old days, but it is a dying art.

In the 60s and 70s it was no longer necessary to learn code to speak to the masses of strangers out there. All one had to do is buy a 4 watt CB radio and you were able to connect to people all over with amplitude modulation signals bouncing off the ionosphere. On a good night one could skip their signals a thousand miles or so like a stone on a pond. Throw in an illegal linear amplifier and you could skip every night no matter the conditions in the ionosphere were.

We humans go to great lengths to communicate with those we do not know. This is why we send out space crafts like Voyager containing messages hopefully to one day be intercepted by other intelligent life forms. We are humans and we have a need to communicate.

Eclectic Tastes

I’m not talking about those young enough to have Hippy parents, but rather to those who had pre-hippy parents that are now over the age of 45. Remember your parent’s record collection? It was usually composed of one type of music; usually pretty bland and white-bread. Have you asked yourself why is it our generation had such eclectic tastes in music? Look at anyone’s collection and you will see that our generation has everything from Classical to Rap to Rock to Bop to Swing to Motown. The list is endless, yet we are only one generation away from the stuff our parents listened to. Why is this?

My theory is because we grew up on Top 40 Radio. Top 40 got a bad reputation when FM became popular. FM formats allowed the playing of longer versions of songs and it allowed a play list of material that was far less commercial. FM became the interesting medium, however it was Top 40 with its tightly scripted format that was in reality the adventurous format.

Think of it, Top 40 didn’t play just the top 40 rock hits. Top 40 played the top hits of every type of music out there. Where else could you hear Frank Sinatra next to the Turtles next to Mason Williams playing Classical Gas. On top 40 you could hear Tennessee Ernie Ford singing 16 Tons, and Herb Alpert’s Spanish Flea. Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit next to Puff the Magic Dragon. How about How Much is the Doggie in the Window and the Battle of New Orleans?

What I am saying is that if you grew up in the Top 40 Radio world you too probably have acquired an eclectic taste for music. My thanks to Dan Ingraham, Harry Harrison, Dandy Dan Daniels and Cousin Brucie and those that worked at 77-WABC when I was a kid.

The Death of a Passion

With the warmer days and the approach of spring there is a certain nagging in my DNA to acknowledge that which is a rite of spring; the opening of baseball season. By this I don’t mean professional baseball or even semi-pro or even high school athletics. I’m talking about the snow finally melting and the ground is too muddy and hard for a kid to play foot ball. Kids have to play something and if it’s spring the game is baseball. This game can be played with as few as two people, but it can be better the more players you have, going up to 8 people per team.

As a kid, these games were spontaneous. As a kid we always traveled on our bikes with a mitt strapped to it somewhere. Somewhere hidden in the bushes around our favorite sand lot was we hid balls and bats. We never measured the distance from the pitcher to the plate or the distance between bases. It was all done by eye. We didn’t even have bases. We’d just find some piece of trash and lay it downs where we though a base should be.

One time one of the guys found a porno magazine out on the sand lot. It was immediately torn into four sections and they became the bases. For us it was more of an incentive to get on base. We were kids out on our own. We made our own rules and we played by them. We were having the time of our lives.

I recently drove by a bunch of kids playing on a ball field. They looked like they were having a hell of a time. They were deeply involved in the joy of life and it was clearly visible. One of the reasons I suspect was because their parents were nowhere in sight. These kids were free from the constraints of parental micromanagement. They were free and didn’t have to look over their shoulders for signs of approval or disapproval. It took me back to the days when I lost my joy for baseball.

I was just a kid at whatever age a kid is when they join the township baseball leagues. This is the one that is for kids that are too young to join Little League. We didn’t have sharp uniforms, but just Tee- Shirts with names on them like Cubs, or Pirates, or Tigers.

It wasn’t my parents that made me join, it was peer pressure. In fact my mother tried talking me out of joining telling me that it would make me hate baseball forever. I couldn’t ever see that as a possibility, so I joined. I should have known that something was up on try-out day. Each kid was given the task of throwing a ball, hitting a ball catching a fly ball and shagging a grouder. When they completed all those tasks they were given a tee-shirt of the team they were on. I immediately noticed that the better players all got darker shirts and the worse you played the lighter in color your shirt was. My shirt was orange. Above me there were black, navy, purple, brown, green and red. Below me were the yellow and white shirts. Everyone wearing a color lighter than brown were doomed to mediocrity.

At that point your team was going to lose every game. Sure you might pick a win by mistake or by forfeit, but you were on a losing team. There were even games where both teams lost.

It was like we enlisted in the military. We were all in uniform and we had people shouting at us. While we were in the outfield we could hear the parents yelling at us. We could hear the coach yelling at us. It was a constant stream of insults peppered with words like “lazy” “hustle” and “wake up!” The coach was the worst. He never shut up and by the end of each game we were morally worn down. When we kids were alone and out of ear shot we wished for the coach to have a painful death so we could all piss on his grave.

Each game of the season got more and more oppressive. There was a collective dread as game day got closer. We all felt it; the entire team. Several of us refused to even show up to the last game of the season. There were at least four of us that became life-long baseball haters after that. To this day I still have not watched a baseball game, nor do I ever plan to. My mother was right, it ruined an innocent passion for the national pastime.

Zen and The Art of A Grudge

I reworked a draft of my first book in 1999. At the same time I was still in touch with a former girl friend who was an artist. I always liked her work. To this day I have two of her etchings and two of her paintings hanging in my home. Her work was good, not great, but good. She was a more imaginative print maker than a painter, but her painting skills were getting noticeably stronger.

In the spirit of keeping in touch I sent her a copy of the draft. About a year later she sent me some photos of her most recent work. I sincerely liked it with her new bold, colorful and rounded style. I wrote her to praise her work comparing her recent style to a reminiscence of Diego Rivera.

The next message I got from her included phrases such as …and the horse you rode in on. She was totally pissed. I suppose my efforts to send her examples of the similarities for a side by side comparison even pissed her off even more. I guess she wanted me to tell her new style was unique and never seen by human eyes before.

So I go to my mailbox tonight to find a large envelope with her return address. Inside is the draft I sent her with a letter that stated: “I never could get through your book. There was just too much I would have torn apart…”

Now that is a woman who can hold a grudge. A ten year grudge is a heavy one. I hope she feels better. I know I got a good laugh out of it.

Spring is Springing

I think it’s great how signs of the coming new seasons arrive often at the mid-point of the existing season. Like sometimes there will be a really hot dry day in May and it will remind you of summer. There will be a colder gloomier day in August that will remind you of autumn. There will be a dusting of snow in November that reminds you of winter.

Here we are now at the later part of January and the daffodil bulbs have sprouted, but more than that the horses have started shedding. You don’t notice it so much with a black horse, but a paint with a lot of white hair you see a dusting of white hair on the ground where she stands most frequently. It’s nearly time to remove the horse blankets and find the curry combs and dedicate all the sluff and skirf to the ground where the birds can collect it for their spring nests.

Spring is nearly here, folks.

Oh No You Don't!

As you may know, I originally came from the east coast; New Jersey to be precise. One thing I do miss about living there was the cultural diversity. Here there is mostly people of Scandahovian heritage, and most of those are third and fourth generation. The next closest thing a foreign heritage here are Californians. Their ideas and cultures are way and I mean way different, though they think they fit in they often don’t but still seem to achieve acceptance by the welcoming locals.

Back East it wasn’t uncommon to meet someone that didn’t speak English. Somehow it was never a problem. I’ve had haircuts by immigrants that just stepped off the boat. The steel mill in town hired several people that just arrived from Poland and Russia. The Greeks came over in droves and learned to speak the language by waiting tables.

When one went to a Pizza Parlor you could expect to hear a mix of English and Italian. In fact that’s how many of us learned how to speak a rudimentary version of Italian. And by the way, for you Orgonians, the word it It-Talian not Eye-Talian.

Pizza was simple in New Jersey. Each Parlor had a distinctive crust, but that was it. There was no deep dish pizza and no white sauce pizza. If you were lucky you could get Calzone, but that was as exotic as it got. Your choice of toppings were: onion, peppers, sausage, olives, mushroom, pepperoni and meatball. Anchovies were also an option though I’ve never actually met anyone that had them on their pizza.

We could be tolerant of a lot of things back then. We could accept vast cultures, but the resistance that met the new craze of the Hawaiian Pizza was astounding. Following shortly on its heals was the Mexican Pizza, yet another abomination. I came to accept these pizzas and even order the Hawaiian from time to time, however I recently saw a pizza on Tango’s Blog that has me drawing a line as to what I will accept as legitimate. The photo above is of the macaroni and cheese pizza. That is just unnatural. How dare they?

R.S.V.P.

The acronym R.S.V.P comes from "Répondez s'il vous plaît", a French phrase that translates to "reply, if you please." I suppose it is always polite to reply regardless of how small the message. I usually reply to all messages other than spam.

You may notice that if you post a comment on any of my posts here I usually acknowledge your comment a day later. I often even reply to comments on older posts and archived posts. Sometimes things do get by me where I’ll forget to reply to comments and I feel guilty when I finally do catch my error.

I guess I do this because I often like to get some sort of acknowledgement when I write someone. I don’t like to be kept hanging when I ask a question. I also suppose that I have a good reputation for replying to people’s comments, questions or emails. I guess I let someone down by not getting my usual last word in.

I was corresponding with one of the readers here. I sent her a question and she replied. A few days later I got the same reply from her again. She thought that since I didn’t reply to her reply I must not have gotten her reply. Se told me that I am usually very good about acknowledging her messages. Now when she writes and we are finished with a particular topic I will finish my final message with the words “Final Message in This String.”

I don’t want to leave her hanging. Let’s see if she replies to this post ; )

About Face

Yesterday I mentioned that Bobby Applegate’s face resembled a parrot. If you think about it there are probably many people in your life that resembled different animals. Bobby had a small pointy mouth attached to a big round head.

I know a few horse faced people. One girl I knew looked a lot like a llama. She had a long neck and a short snout. I grew up with a set of twins that looked like raccoons. There are some people I see today that resemble cats and when I see a mouth breather I often think they look like fish. I’ve known a mouse and a rat.

I’ve seen some people that look like sharks and a few that look like apes. There is one local woman here in Dried Salmon County (boy I haven’t used that phrase in a year or so) with big round eyes that looks like she is constantly in shock. She doesn’t move her eyes, but moves her head to look at things. I’ve seen her around for at least ten years now and every time I see her I think of her as a chicken. The only thing that is missing from her is wagging her neck back and forth when she walks.

I’ve known jowly, saggy eyed people that resembled basset hounds. I’ve known people that looked like poodles and others that look like bull dogs. Fortunately no one ever found an animal resemblance in me, though being six feet two inched in the 7th grade I was often called a bean.