Lords and Ladies

If you grew up on a dirt road in New England like I did, you know about the fifth season:  Mud season.  In the interest of keeping everyone on the same page, know this:  Mud season is the season sort of in between winter and spring when the snow melts off and everything turns to mud. 

It's not very romantic, and it involves a lot of slogging to the bus stop in boots that come up so high they obscure your vision. 

So... I was thinking about something earlier; lords of yore!  More specifically, Lord Winterfall.  Where did I hear that?  I have no idea, but get this:  What if Lord Winterfall had a family and all their names followed the same theme? 

  **The scene:  A strikingly beautiful castle on a hilltop.  Trumpets sound, banners and other such festoonery are strung with gusto across courtyards, and wreathes of fresh local flora garnish the
usually intimidating battlements.** 

The strong voice of a brightly-garbed herald rises above the general hubbub and the noise of the crowd shrinks to a hushed murmur. 

"Ladies and gentleman may I present Lord Winterfall, and his lovely wife Countess Autumn!"

There is much craning of necks and nodding of heads as the regal couple makes their way through the lavish throne room, adorned in the finest furs and silk.  Lord Winterfall inconspicuously crop-dusts a group of obnoxious merchants whom he knows are only there to score brownie points.  He leans over and whispers to his wife.

"Shazzam!"  She tries not to laugh and snorts a little. 

The herald continues.

"May I present the Winterfall's beautiful daughter, Summer!"

Every teenage peasant boy in the place has his heart broken as the most beautiful girl they have ever seen calmly walks past without looking at any of them and takes her place at her mothers side. 

"May I present Lord Winterfalls son and heir to the Winterfall throne; Mud!"

Mud always hated formal functions. 

TSN

Fish

We used to wake up super early to go fishing.  Other than appreciating the stillness that only the middle of a lake at 5am offers, I'm not sure why we got up that early.  I never really noticed an increase in the number of fish I caught vs other times of day.  It raises several questions about fish that I want answered, right now dammit!

Do fish do the three meals a day thing?  Snacks?  Diets? 
Do they wake up hungry for breakfast? 
Do they even sleep?  Do they snore?
Do fish yawn and stretch? 
Do they ever get colds?  What does a fish-sneeze sound like?
Would a fish take NyQuil, wake up groggy and angry, stumble to the bathroom and... wait... no. 
Fish have no eyelids... if a fish is hanging out in a school of other fish and he fells asleep in class... does anybody notice? 
Do wiesenhiemer fish smack other fish with xylophone hammers and quip about "practicing the scales?" 
If I stand on a fish will it tell me how much I weigh? 
If a fish tied a grilled-cheese sandwich to a string and threw it up onto a dock, could he catch a little old man? 
Would that same fish later exaggerate to his friends about how big the little old man was? 
Do fish have friends?  Do they keep in touch on FishBook? 

Uh oh.   

I gotta get out of here before somebody slaps me.  With a fish.   

TSN

Naked People in Trees

I was watching the nature channel the other day and there was this thing on about how amazing people are in our ability to thrive just about anywhere.  One was about a tribe somewhere in the jungle that lives in these tree houses hundreds of feet off the ground.   

So if a guy wants to borrow a cup of sugar from his neighbor, he's got to climb down hundreds of feet, skip along the jungle floor for a bit and then scamper up another couple of hundred feet.  Repeat on the way back, all the while holding a measuring cup.  I can see it now...

"Baby can you run over to Frankie and Darlene's and see if they can't spare a cup of sugar?
*Groooooaaaan* "Dammit I just sat down!"
"C'mon I want to get this made before the typhoon knocks us out of here like so many ripe apples and we all plummet to our hungry deaths!"
"Fiiiiiine!  Give me a minute."

He takes off through the trapdoor in the floor, she gets distracted and sits down to watch the game.  He rolls in an hour and a half later, covered in sweat and barely breathing.  She tries to pretend she wasn't napping. 

"Where have you been?" 

He points out the window to the neighbors house, eight feet away.  Frankie sees him and waves. 

If it were me, I'd get the cup of sugar all the way back to the kitchen and then spill it and be like "DAMMIT!  Now we're gonna have ants!"

Ants are workers too, you'd better believe those little buggers would find that sugar on my kitchen floor and line right up to get a grain. 

Sometimes I suspect they film other cultures just because they know they can get away with showing them running around naked on family TV.  I recognize that as some good ol' left-over Puritan mentality there. 

We all look approximately the same naked... but it's not okay to see naked people, unless you're a certain age, or if they're from a different culture, or if you pay them (directly or through a third party). 

Cultural idiosyncrasies baby, oh yeah! 

TSN

This Morning

Dark and silent only broken by a soft rumble

and the telltale sound of gears

expertly manipulated on quiet streets. 

A rumble interrupted at stop signs

whose stern message I observe halfheartedly

in tamed and mindless obedience to the letter of the law. 

Tires on gravely blacktop crunch through sleepy neighborhoods

and hot coffee gingerly sipped through a spill proof lid

washes my teeth in their morning brown. 

Headlights on reflective paint and unlit rooms behind shop glass

show me only the yellow wavering eyes of my transport as I glide through,

an approaching harmless growl quickly passing. 

Bundles of dwellings with windows softly lit

by the unobtrusive lamps of breakfast blur

into the fading dark in side view as my wheels roll ever slower

with unliving familiarity towards my entry point to the highway. 

Here I negotiate with barely a thought through hurling distracted death

and plunge safely into the relentlessly sputtering stream of early risers. 

I pilot my sanctuary into disciplined step

with the first few to whom my fate is so anonymously intertwined

as together we ride the ebb and flow of our communal vein of light to our destinations. 

Largely motionless inside my bubble of metal and controlled explosions

I watch the rise and swell of the rolling hills passing beneath me,

and guide with tempered hand my weaving dance around the maypole of commuters. 

White fences draw their ghostly crooked lines across my windows

as the  darkness above speeds westward,

chased by long low lines of color which bubble from the vibrating horizon in my rear view. 

Subtle hues of red slowly begins to saturate the world around me,

condensing in tiny pools which pry obscure shapes from the background,

forming them into farmhouses and sheds, mailboxes and off-center hand-painted signs.

More colors draw strength from reds boldness and spread

with growing confidence across the land and sky. 

At last, even as I watch,

heralded by the march of a humble but persistent army of color and light

the triumphant glowing forehead of the sun breaches the earth

and drives the last bits of darkness to cower in shivering formation behind miles of fence posts. 

TSN

In Days of Old, When Knights Were Bold

Being a knight, doing the whole lancing thing, that seems like it wouldn't be much fun.  So much armor you can barely move, tiny eye-slits to peek out of, and on a bad day at the office you wind up on your face in the dirt twitching around because you can't stand up on your own.  Possibly with a splintered piece of wood protruding from some place on your body.

"What's that poking out of your face there Ed?"
"Ah, it's just a bit of lumber.  Nothing to worry about."

Zipper technology hadn't really taken hold yet either, much less zippers robust enough to grant access through 1/8" plate armor.  Much easier just to pee on yourself than to try and weasel out of all that gear.  Must have smelled pretty rank.  Come to speak of it, deodorant wasn't exactly topping the charts at the market either.

Imagine some smitten little maiden, all excited when her knight in shining armor comes galloping up to her window... he gathers her up, puts her on the horse behind him... she tries to put her arms around him but the joints in the armor keep pinching her every time the horse takes a step so she winds up doing a balancing act on her maidenly buttocks. 

She quickly realizes that he reeks of pee, body odor and (for some reason) soggy dog.  He's oblivious to it,  having ridden for days to rescue her in the hot sun.  He finally gets back to his pad, she's been bounced half to death on the ass end of a horse, her hair is a mess and now she's faced with the task of peeling away layers of armor, mail, leathers and whatever anti-chaff mechanisms he's got on under there. 

The smell punches her directly in the face, and she swoons.  He thinks she's just impressed by his ever-so-manly physique, and comes in for a smooch.  Just ahead of his approaching lips is a wall of stink like dead skunk and spoiled milk soup in a Limburger cheese bowl.  She does her best to cope, but at the last minute her survival instincts take over; she knees him in the crotch and takes off running down the cobblestones. 

And they live happily ever after.

TSN

Wrong

Someday I want to be that crazy old guy with the big shorts and the metal detector who happens across an ancient treasure of limitless value that completely disproves absolutely everything we think we know about anything. 

That would be neat.  Especially if it only disproved everything, without bothering to offer up any suggestions about what might actually be going on. 

"Sorry folks, it looks like everything is wrong."
"What do you mean? What is it thats wrong?"
"Everything."
"That's impossible!"
"You're wrong."

Then somebody figures out that we're all just consciousness singularities with different sum-polarizations interacting clumsily with one another, like so many magnets (only with infinite polarization possibilities instead of just the two usual ones) rattling around in what can only be described as an "expanse" which occupies neither space nor time. 

That would explain a lot. 

But I don't even own a metal detector, so the likelihood of that happening anytime soon is pretty slim.  I do have a few pairs of wicked big shorts, however. 

TSN

Squirrel Drama

What must a squirrel be thinking when he gets halfway across the road and suddenly realizes that there's an enormous loud thing barreling towards him at sixty miles per hour?  Maybe this: 

"Doot dee doo... hey maybe I'll go over there, yeah, that's what I'll do!  Doot dee doo... HOLY CRAP!  How did I not notice that before?  It's right there!  AWW, MOTHER $@%)&!" 

Wide eyed and panic-stricken, he freezes.  Woooooosh!  The tires crunch by just 2.5 centimeters from his nose.  He feels the heat from the exhaust, and the turbulence bowls him over.  In mid somersault he wonders why he'd bothered to measure the distance from his nose to the tire, and also where he had found a metric ruler of squirrel proportions. 

"Duuuuuuude..."

Shaken, he bugs out.  Back to his happy place halfway up a tree, where he sits panting in the crook of a limb for some time.  With unsteady paws, he pours himself a scotch on the rocks and busts out his hand-held wireless device from a little known pocket that squirrels have. 

*boop-beep-booo, beep-beep-boop-booo* 

In the animal kingdom, local phone calls are still seven digits. 

"Hello?"
"Baby?"
"Hey, you sound weird, are you okay?"
"Not really, just about got smeared."
"Oh my fuzzy God, are you alright?"
"I think so, $!*% me..."
"My parents are coming to stay with us for a couple of months."
"Hang on, I think I left something on the other side of the road."
*click, brrrrrrrrrrr...........

TSN

Career Choices

Every once in a while I remember that there are people out there doing things that I haven't the foggiest idea about.  There are people who have dedicated their entire careers to studying things that I've never even heard of, or at least never gave a second thought to. 

Here's what I imagine it would be like for me to accidentally attend a gathering of such people: 

**I stroll into an auditorium full of folks, completely lost in a casino hotel, casually munching on a Philly cheese-steak sandwich.  I sit down in the back row, fully expecting to be kicked out at any moment for not wearing shoes.  I'm right on time.  The guy behind the podium starts talking.

"Welcome to this evenings seminar on the effects of densely focused ionized particle beams on the feelings of common household furniture.  I'll get started with an experiment we've all used as a warm-up in our labs, just to get things moving." 

**He walks over to a gnarly old couch which takes up a good bit of the stage.  He reaches into the cushions and pulls out a large cauliflower, which he places into a giant cauldron of bubbling liquid.  I begin to get nervous.

"The rechthiomyms in this radish broth are now infiltrating the recently reclined vegetable, which will (as you all know) cause any loose sofius detritus to become infused with pan-substantial mucoids." 

**I wake up seventeen hours later in a crappy diner with two phone numbers and a calculus equation scrawled on my face in lipstick.  I order coffee and waffles. 

Knowing everything would only be cool for a little while, after that it'd be pretty boring. 

It's good to know that there are people out there doing things to which I will probably forever remain oblivious. 

Maybe you're one of those people!  That would be cool. 

TSN

I Blame the Bees.

Today I heard someone say this:  "I drove through two Indian reservations with a couple of buffalo skulls in the back of my car.  It felt kinda weird..." 

Oh, the inherited guilt that stems from the misdeeds of generations past!  As for me, I'm of sufficiently muddled lineage that I don't feel responsible for any of the misdeeds of my ancestors.  

Speaking of ancestors, haven't we got our whole image of the "family tree" all wrong?  Why is the youngest generation always shown at the bottom of the tree?  Wouldn't the roots of the tree be the earliest known ancestors, spreading upward to become the branches which become entangled in the branches of adjacent trees? 

Here's a thought:  Cross-pollination of ancient family trees was facilitated in part by bees!  How, you ask?  Bees make honey, which is used to make mead (which is wine, for non-Renaissance fair types), which has marked influence on inhibitions, which leads to all manner of getting sticky.  Bam!  Cross-pollination.   

I know, it's a stretch. 

We can probably credit Barry White as much as we can bees. 

(super smooth voice) "Aww yeah."

That's some good facilitating.   

Maybe it's all been roots, rather than branches.  That would mean that I'm the bit of the plant that's enjoying its moment in the sun right now, before it gets covered over by time and becomes part of the roots.

TSN

Convenience and Clarity

There are so many lenses through which we can watch the world. 

Here's a shot I took this morning while the machine behind me automatically deducted ones and zeros from a bank account for petrol that wold get me to a place where I could earn more ones and zeros... that I can use to buy petrol. 

There are a lot of ways to think about this picture; here are a few.

This is a picture of a gas station at sunrise.
This is a representation of a moment in time.
This is a picture of America. 
This is a picture of the past; the perspective of a single human being for a tiny instant. 
Why is the sun setting so early in the morning?
Who uses a cell phone camera while pumping gas?  Isn't that a huge static discharge, inconceivably
    huge explosion and untimely death sort of thing to do?
This picture is worth exactly 1000 words.
Why is my normally much greater line of sight limited by this box all of a sudden?
Why do I get the feeling that the photographer wasn't wearing pants?

There is a poet inside everyone.  The poet is either out, getting out, dying to get out, or just dying. 

Just something to consider.

TSN

Sometimes you gotta cannonball

I need to relearn how to be impulsive.  Being reserved and calculated has its advantages (and I've enjoyed them more and more as I get older), but there is something about impulsiveness that I think I'm missing out on. 

One day I hope to have enough stuff in here that I can sort through it for nuggets that I especially enjoy and publish them as a collection of sorts... random things, make it down-loadable for Kindle and stuff like that... But that's an incremental way of looking at it.  If I really had something to say, some great idea, some awe-inspiring piece of work that needed to be written, I'd better write it and get it done hadn't I?

Who knows if I'll keep this up.  A blog a day... maybe I'll skip a day, then two days... next thing I know I have to get the password hints just to get myself logged in. 

"At what school did the second-best friend of your youngest uncle play the role of fifth shish-kabob?"
"Monkey Nuts Elementary" 
"Your account has been locked out.  Please try again in 3-5 business days."
"Damn, maybe I abbreviated it to MNE when I set up the account..."

Then my game of increments will have petered out.  I don't want that! 

Sometimes the patience game is what you gotta do.  I've been practicing my guitar for some 14 years now and I still love it;  every time I play, I get a little better.  Those were great increments!  Now I can reap the rewards every time I jam out a song that nobody (including me) has ever heard before (or likely will again). 

Saving money for the kids college, investing long term, learning to cook... that sort of thing:  I'll take my time. 
Putting things on the back burner that I'm passionate about?  Maybe it's time to go all in. 

Life is the great game of increments, but the things that life encompasses don't have to be.

You can't nickle and dime your dreams. 

TSN

Food Network Presents: Military Week

C-130 Hercules... those big gunships, with the cannon poking out the side... those are cool.  If you don't know what I'm talkin 'bout, it's the one from the first Transformers movie that shot up the scorpion kill-bot in the sand.  Yes, that's it. 

What if we were to engineer non-lethal ammunition for the C-130H that could disperse huge quantities of all-natural bacon-bits over acres at a time in a single attack?  It would be glorious!  The tail-gunner would be feeding one end of the bandoleer into the cannon and the other into his mouth. 

Better yet, a heavy bomb payload for the B-2!  Code named:  "The Stealth Porker", as I believe "Ninja Swine" is already taken.   

"What's that?!  Up in the sky!  It's the Baco-Bomb and lordy it smells delicious!  Quick kids, get out there with your buckets!"

Instead of ducking for cover and dying in horrible fiery explosions anyway, pork loving people could instead quickly prepare salads and run outside to hold them towards the heavens!  Yes! 

Also it would make bomb disposal much easier during peacetime.  The explosive ordinance disposal techs would all be chubby, with little canisters of croutons on their utility belts next to their multi-tools. 

During wartime however, it would be devastating against those with aversions to pork technology.  That's  for a variety of reasons of course, not the least of which being the fact that the ammo would be fresh from the kitchens, so there would still be a good deal of hot grease involved. 

TSN

This is the only place you'll see the word "beaver" in this entire post.

I read a study recently that interested me.  It's about teenagers and why they do such completely illogical, poorly thought out and generally stupid stuff... long story short, a team of researchers determined that teenagers are quite capable of making logical decisions, but if they find themselves in the presence of other teenagers, they don't. 

That equation looks like this:  1+1 = 0

I guess math is wrong.  Who knew?  I want some tests re-graded.  If math is wrong, it follows that science is thusly boned as well.  Might as well discount the whole curriculum as lies, all lies!  Except wood shop.  I think wood shop would be okay without math, we'd just have to go back to using oddball units of measurement like cubits or moose turds or something. 

Speaking of everything being wrong, does anybody else get the feeling that our entire society is getting ready to plummet all helter-skelter into chaos and despair?  There's probably not too much I can do about that besides stock up on Spam, hunker down and wait ever-so-patiently for the zombie-apocalypse that looms ominously on the horizon like an armada of indestructible alien warships that didn't come in peace. 

I don't like it.  Spam that is.  I'm curiously comfortable with the zombie apocalypse. 

TSN

Accidents happen.

Can I be arrested for "leaving the scene of an accident" if the accident was me crapping my pants?  In leaving, as I coolly penguin walk on out of there, am I taking the accident with me or is the "scene of the accident" defined by the place I was actually standing when the accidental crapping took place? 

These are deep thoughts, I know.

What if I accidentally left a 25% tip instead of 15% on the table at a diner, and then walked off like I'd done nothing wrong?  If it was a miscalculation on my part and later I realize that now I'm dire financial straits, am I still a bad person? 

Me:  "Oh woe be to me and my unfortunate leaving of that extra-wrinkly George Washington!  Now I can't pay my water bill and I've sure been doing a lot of laundry lately, what with me crapping my pants and all." 
Random other guy on the bus:  (bursts onto the scene with a box of powdered detergent) "Tough stains?  Blast them out with new Poo-Gone Dribble Negation Powder!  It's zesty!"
Me:  (Looking bewildered) "But I heard it caused heart palpitations in lab rats?" 
Him:  "Naaaaaah." 
Me:  "Excellent!  Poo-Gone, you're the stain blaster for me!"  (Two thumbs up)

   **Que 24-minute choreographed dance sequence involving all the bus passengers and one well behaved Schnauzer named Chorizo.**

TSN
TheShadowsNose

Problem Solved

I like a phone call where the person who called me tells me that a problem I never knew about has been resolved.  I'm usually like "Great!  That's good news!"  Actually I'm not really sure what kind of news it is.  I guess it depends. 

It could be bad news, if the problem that I didn't know about was something that had already damaged my life in some way, or that generally makes me nervous. 

"Hey they finally caught that rogue caribou that was destroying your living room."
"Great!  That's good news!" 
"Whelp, see you later."
"K, bye." 
*click

When I get a random-problem-has-been-solved call, it's better when the news is neutral.  That way I can be glad to hear it despite the fact that seconds before the phone rang I didn't know or care about it at all. 

"Alright so the total cost of the new generic gorilla-tuft tiles will be $385, aaaaaand it looks like that's covered under warranty.  We'll go ahead and bill the company directly.  Did you have any questions?"
".... nope."
"Great, well have a nice day sir."
"You too."
"If you can spare a couple of minutes for a survey, stay on the..."
*click

Random unexpected good news is the best. 

"You don't have gonorrhea!"
"Neat!"
*click

Then there's wrong number news which seems good, until you realize you don't know which team you're on. 

"Well it looks like none of the liquid-plasmodium, hypergoo smart-missiles did any significant damage to the hard drive backlash interface, we just had to replace some wiring."
"Great!  Wait... whose liquid-plasmodium, hypergoo smart-missiles?"
"Um... is this Charlie?"
"No, this is Dave? Spaulding..."
 "Oh, sorry."
*click
 
TSN
TheShadowsNose

"PunCtuation and... (wait for it) capiTalizatioN!"

Here's a thought:  What if someone went through the legal process of having the last letter of their name be a question mark?  If I were to do that, (and if my name were Dave Spaulding, for example) my name would become Dave?.  Then I could have the three suspenseful dots put at the end of my last name, so people always had to pause after they said it.  They'd introduce me as "Dave? Spaulding..." 

This next sentence would sound crazy if you didn't know about my snazzy new name spelling: 

          "Has anyone seen Dave? Spaulding... this morning?"

Punctuation is a powerful thing.  Without it all I hear in my minds ear when I read is that weird sci-fi robot voice.  All caps and no punctuation makes it sound like the robot is yelling.  Why would a robot yell?  What point could it possibly be trying to make?  Maybe it's an American robot and it's speaking to a robot that doesn't speak English.  Then it would also yell slowly, and make incomprehensible hand gestures. 

"CAN I HAVE (raises eyebrows and tilts head)... ONE ORDER OF NACHOS (draws a triangle and pretends to eat it)... AND (plus sign, as if trying to frighten off a vampire) A CHEESE DANISH (gestures towards the moon)... PLEASE?" (waves arms wildly in the air) 

That is all,

TSN

 -The ShadowsNose?

On anonymous sensitivity, ticks, and bears.

Out of curiosity, I want to ask the anonymous Internet public at large the following question:  What is the meanest thing you can think of to say to someone, and what is the nicest? 

My prediction:  The variety would be staggering, and the most creative stuff would be mean.  Why?  Because communism didn't work.   

We're a pretty tough-skinned bunch nowadays...  pretty desensitized.  How much shock and awe can there be before it's just "yaaaawwwwwwn...whatever, butt-dumpling".  I'm just curious. 

Also, today I rediscovered that if you're working outside and someone gets a tick on them, everyone else gets the willies.  The willies last for about an hour, then there's a lull while everyone forgets for a while, then they get the willies again. 

It would be less creepy if it were bears rather than ticks that were the problem.  Here's why:  If you have a bear biting your leg just above your sock line, you know it.  It's not something you figure out after he's been munching there awhile.   

1.

For a guy going to college for a degree in information technology it's kind of embarrassing when I realize just how sadly behind I am.  This is the point where I either claw, scratch and bite my way out of the horrifying seductive prowess of aged ignorance, or be forever doomed to shake my fist at "those damn kids and their new-fangled gadgets" from my front porch.

I also imagine myself wearing overalls and no shirt for some reason. 

The overalls may or may not include a trap door. 

So I got me a smart phone and started feverishly downloading apps and whatnot.  I set up a thousand accounts, most of which I immediately forgot the passwords for and then spent the next several days wading through password resets.  Now I've broken every security protocol and written them all down. 

Now here I am, blogging to myself in the darkness of my man cave while the family is snoozing soundly upstairs.  They're a good bunch, although the man of the house is kind of a nut bar.   That would be me, coincidentally. 

I grew up alongside all this technology, really I should be more familiar with it.  I'm 32, I was in third grade when all the classrooms got Apple computers and we played 8-bit "Oregon Trail" on Thursdays and inevitably died of amoebic dysentery.  Damn amoebic dysentery! 

We played Atari... I saved up for a Sega Genesis when those came out, but by the time I got it my friends had beaten me so mercilessly, repeatedly and without remorse in Mortal Kombat that I became dead inside.  

My folks had an old piece of excrement of a computer even given the time frame.  I remember being amazed by a mouse, then being amazed by an optical mouse.... then a wireless optical mouse... and then at the actual mouse that had chewed through the wire.

It changed fast, and I didn't keep up very well.  The catch-up game is tricky!  I realized that I just need to dive in and do it instead of being intimidated by it.  My phone can now do hundreds more things in the blink of an eye than every bit of technology in my childhood home could do in a week, with the notable exceptions of making toast and scrubbing grass stains out of my soccer jersey.  That's cool!

It's a lousy cook but it can find restaurants that deliver, and that's just swell. 

What's the moral of all this?  Maybe that it's not better to have time to grow and adapt slowly.  Maybe it's better to get smacked directly in the face with everything at once and either thrive or run screaming into the night with your hands flailing in the air. 

We'll see. 

TSN
- The Shadows Nose