During our Old Farts Tuesday discount run for groceries in Dushore, we bought a Chicken Thigh Family pack.
Wow! I thought I’d never get to meet the Chicken Thigh Family. Makes me feel like a dumb cluck.
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We’ve been trying to get Lexie, our recently acquired German shepherd, to stop barking incessantly whenever… anything happens. Looking at training videos on YouTube, it turns out that dog training is really dog-owner training – “experts” telling you how to realign your mindset and objectives so that the dog will think it’s worth listening to you. [Or that you uncover your inner dog.]
My favorite example is a brutally obnoxious sod who starts off telling us in so many words that he knows everything worthwhile about how to train a dog and make you happy. Which turns out to be treating the dog like a military recruit who will never have the gumption to even consider barking back.
My owner-response to Sir Expert:
Go fuck a cactus.
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Every one of you in rumination land should take the time to read this marvelous tale of a poor Brazilian boy who has lost his beloved flightless bird:
Gone, a Rhea
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I’ve always been puzzled by the country blues standard, “Sitting on Top of the World.” Your girl’s done left you, “but I’m not worried, I’m sitting on top of the world.” Now, I’d be worried, or at least fucking miserable, so what’s going on here?
Looking up the song’s history, it turns out it was composed and recorded in 1930 by Walter Vinson and Lonnie Chatmon of the Mississippi Sheiks, a Black country band, after playing at a white dance in Greenwood, Mississippi.
So, a few months after the stock market crash of 1929, what might a Southern Black have been feeling? Maybe a bit of payback at watching white America in the same situation as “free” Black America had been for the past half-plus century.
“Sitting on top of the world.”
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Mindless Generic Responses That Drive Me Batshit, #27:
“an abundance of caution”
A phrase suggesting an over-arching expenditure of time and effort given to investigation, following a negative incident, that anyone with half a functioning mind would expect the investigator to undertake as a matter of course.
Suggested alternatives: “a bum dance of caution,” or, for a bit more alliteration, “a cornucopia of caution”, “a cavalcade of caution”, a “concatenation of caution”.
Or, honesty, “a blessing of soundbite”.
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I finished re-reading Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human for the first time since it came out in 1953, and it remains an amazing work, every bit as good as I remembered it. He was probably my favorite author of SF/fantasy at the time; the remarkable twists to his short stories and novels have never left me. So I decided to read up on his life.
He was born on Staten Island in NYC with the underwhelming name of Edward Hamilton Waldo. When his mother remarried to a man named Sturgeon, our would-be author adopted the stepfather’s last name.
Well, wouldn’t you?
But here’s the detail really grabbed me: During his early teens, probably around 1932, Sturgeon’s stepfather taught Romance languages at Drexel Institute in Philly, and the family moved into “a small apartment on 34th St.”
Wherever that house exactly stood, it’s probably long gone, considering Penn and Drexel’s decades of rapacious expansion. But I can’t help wondering… could it have been in Powelton Village, where I lived for over 50 years, maybe even around the corner from my last home there, 3311 Baring St., where I met Linda? Umm, not likely.
And who would have thought that Drexel, at the time known almost solely for engineering, had a Romance languages department? That’s nothing against engineers. My big brother Rod was a chemical engineer, and he was romantic as all hell – in his own non-obvious way.
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To end with, a weed-whacker’s lullaby:
Amazing grass, how sweet the scent
It blows me out of my gourd,
I once was low, but now am high,
I’m bombed, and I’m not bored.
lickhaven 