This morning, while my wife was taking a shower, I waited for her in our bedroom. I knelt down on the far side of the bed, and when she came through the door, I shot her with a Nerf gun.
It’s the little things in this world you treasure.
I’m beginning to think only the Victorians understood romance. Most everything before that was rutting. Everything after was a tax form. It’s not called Eleanor Roosevelt’s Secret for a very good reason, you know.
I live in a Victorian house with a Victorian woman and raise Edwardian kids in a Byronic Fashion. You should try it, it’s fun.
Happy Valentine’s Day, my beloved, from the stiff at the other end of the table.
[Valentine is from Victorian Lace-Paper Valentines]
My nine-year-old gets up to stuff. He told the funniest joke I ever heard, at the dinner table the other night.
That wasn’t it. The joke, I mean. We’ve been reading Aesop’s Fables fairly regularly. I see the format has sunk in. I thought you might be hard up for a Valentine Card at the last minute, so you can print it out and give it to your beloved. It’s not really a Valentine’s Card, but you can’t afford to be fussy at this late date.
My son sneaks into my office when I’m working in the shop, and he uses the Photodraw utility. He doesn’t have it on his computer. He only has Paint, so Photodraw is like access to a supercomputer to him. But then again, Da Vinci smeared paint on a board with a paint brush made from squirrel-hair. You wanna know why the Mona Lisa is smiling? She knows the most famous painting in the world is being executed using roadkill, so she couldn’t help smiling quietly to herself. Road kill on a stick isn’t exactly high tech. But then again, very few people are truly limited by their tools. They just find it convenient to blame them.
Oh yes; the joke. I used to think the funniest joke ever was:
Q: Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
A: I don’t know. Why did the monkey fall out of the tree?
Q; Because it was dead.
That was even funnier than telling people about your dog that has no nose. But it’s not the funniest joke ever — not any more it isn’t. My son absolutely eclipsed the old one. Put it in the shade, as they say. Killed it.
Would you like me to tell it to you? I will, if you want me to. Give me some sort of sign here.
OK. Here goes:
We were eating dinner together. My wife says, “Hey, the Pope quit.” My older son says, “Being the Pope must make it hard to get a job doing anything else after you quit. I mean, what exactly does a Pope know how to do?” And then the little feller said, “Maybe he could get a job as a window washer.”
There was a pause. Maybe five or ten seconds by the clock. Then he held up his little hand, and waved it gently back and forth.
We’ll get the food off the walls in there eventually.
Nota Bene: Never fear, Sippican Cottage readers; I’ll beat that little turd like an orphan in a Dickens novel over his spelling mistakes.
When I was younger, I played music for money.
99.99 percent of the music I played, I hated. I didn’t care for the remainder, but I didn’t hate it.
We played pop music covers, mostly not current ones. We needed a lot of material. We’d attempt to figure out what people would want to hear resurrected, in advance. That’s tricky. We didn’t hang around in bars anymore –we worked in them. It was already too late to figure out what we should be doing by the time we were in there.
We’d meet in the slack winter season, once a week for a month or so. Everyone would bring in a handful of suggestions. We sort of voted on each. It wasn’t a popularity contest. We didn’t say: I don’t like it. I told you; I didn’t like anything. We said: It won’t get over; or it will. If it wasn’t unanimous, we didn’t bother. Unanimity didn’t guarantee success, either, but dry holes were more likely to be found in controversial drilling. That’s dreadful enough to be popular was a common assessment.
It was deuced difficult to get the source material into everyone’s hands back then. Before the Intertunnel, it was real work to lay your hands on music you didn’t like. For a while, I used to go to a store that sold 45s wholesale to people that filled jukeboxes. They’d have everything trite, so they were wonderful. But back then, I’d have to painstakingly figure out all the parts by listening to the records, and communicate it to the other fellows when we met. It was hard work.
My son plays music all the time now. He can find anything he wants, immediately and without charge. He can get a really high-quality instructional video, too, never mind just the source material. YouTube is an enormously useful thing. The Intertunnel is an enormously useful thing.
Or not.
I have opinions. I’m a big, hairy man with big, hairy opinions. Most of what is on the Intertunnel is just opinion; ill-considered, ill-reasoned, ill-mannered opinion, and inelegantly stated. It’s useless. Services that exist simply to aggregate and direct me to various strains of this twaddle are so much less than useless, I may have to coin a term for it. Distilled twaddle. Twiddle?
The Intertunnel is the most useful thing I’ve ever seen. Because it has an editor. That editor is me. Without the editor, the Intertunnel is the most useless thing I’ve ever seen.
Good luck out there.
Find Stuff:
Recent Comments