If you brew it, they will come

Dateline: Iowa--This could be the best Halloween story of the year. The economy, presidential campaign, and natural disasters have given us so many terrors that we've reached catastrophe overload. We are desensitized, and feeling pretty helpless to make a difference.

Enter the field of screams from stage right. Can't you see Mrs. Olson with those Folgers' fangs? I vont to dwink your coffee and hang upside down all night until my brains are cooked. [Not that this resembles any college student sons.]

Each morning I drink several mugfuls of coffee, then add my used filter full of grounds to the worm bin. I'm not all that awake, and I've never checked for boiled bat brains in the filter.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa used to seem like the safest place on earth. Powdered non-dairy creamer seemed like one of life's most frightening aspects.

Sending my best wishes to this unfortunate woman who had to endure rabies shots. I hope she got to watch one of Kevin Costner's better movies in the treatment room.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa (AP) _ It wasn't just the caffeine that gave an Iowa woman an extra jolt after she had her morning coffee. It was also the bat she found in the filter.
The Iowa Department of Public Health says the woman reported a bat in her house but wasn't too worried about it. She turned on her automatic coffee maker before bedtime and drank her coffee the next morning.

She discovered the bat in the filter when she went to clean it that night. The woman has undergone treatment for possible rabies.

Health officials say that the bat was sent to a lab but that its brain was too cooked by the hot water to determine whether it had rabies.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Tom Sawyer had it right

Some nights I crawl into bed feeling utterly defeated by one of Earth's simplest creatures. Other bedtimes I am too pumped with a sense of superiority to fall asleep. It's pretty pathetic that I'm doing an endzone victory dance to celebrate rounding up some red wigglers to move them to a new bin.

I've spent a ridiculous number of hours studying websites, blogs, and county extension pamphlets to learn the best methods for separating worms from dirt. I've joined an online community of vermicomposters, for heavens' sake! How much more serious must I be to get the worms out of the awesome dirt they created?

A worm and his dirt are not soon parted.

That doesn't sound right. Maybe a boy and his dog are too soon parted. No, no, no! That sounds like a bad episode of "Lassie".

A fool and his money are soon parted. Is that Aesop or P. T. Barnum?

I've tried so far:

1. Herding worms by placing all the food at one end of the worm bin.


2. Putting spoonfuls from the worm bin onto sheets of black plastic to encourage the worms to dive down holes to richer new colonies below.


3. Creating a hedonistic fruitopia in a bin within the bin hoping young worms would be upwardly mobile and self-motivated.


4. Luring worms down through a plastic colander like errant spaghetti.


5. Shining a bright light to encourage worms to hurry under the nearest shady beach umbrella.

So far, the only time-efficient method is sitting down, stirring the compost with a garden fork, and pulling out the worms by hand. It's not disgusting. It's pretty amazing realizing how many thousands of living creatures can occupy such a small place. Probably I could let you have a turn if you paid me a nickel.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Irresistible force meets immovable alphabet?

"Could we play the rhyming game again? Can we make pig wig?," the preK student asks.

"Absolutely! That would be fun," I say, impressed that she considers our recent word-building endeavor a game. "What do we need?"

"The at bat hat book and the immobile alphabet," she says, and scurries off to find them.

There's a funny mental image. It must be wheelchair day at the double A baseball game! I'm putting on my rally cap for this at bat.

Her "immobile alphabet" is really the classic teaching movable alphabet. Maybe writer's block is just a bad case of immobilized alphabet...
"Can I play, too? I played yesterday!," a second girl asks. She's a bit older, and can think of sat fat rat. Of course she may join us.

Speaking of fat rats and immobile alphabets, my Cingular cellphone service recently changed to "AT&T Mobility". What a silly name! The word mobility doesn't inspire thoughts of untethered phoning freedom. It instantly conjures its opposite, immobility. Oh, great. I've got a cellphone that needs a ramp, and I'm paying how much a month?!

Back with the rhyming preK girls, we play the "game" with at, it, ox, ig, og, ug. I'm delighted when they put their consonant heads together to figure out twig. Sure, they have some ideas that don't make words. The best is vog. "You know, Ms. Nancy, vog, when you can't see anything!" That vould be a Transylvanian fog.


Why am I wearing my at bat hat rally cap on this voggy day? CollageMama is celebrating in the dugout on the twenty-first birthday of her youngest son. Pour that nice ice lime rhyme cooler of Gatorade on her head!

Put the rhyme in the coconut, shake it all up. Put the rhyme in the coconut, call the doctor, wake him up.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

ESL by Avodart

I rarely turn on my television, so visiting my dad is like learning a foreign language by the total immersion method. If a family arrived in the United States and wanted to learn English by watching television, the first phrase they would master would be, "ask your doctor about." Soon they would be able to recite "in the rare event of an erection lasting more than four hours, seek immediate medical attention to avoid long-term injury."

True, Dad's viewing tends toward ESPN, the Golf Channel, the Weather Channel, CNN Headline News,and MSNBC, with some local news broadcasts thrown in. The ads on those stations repeat ad nauseum. I'm somewhat embarrassed to report that the most effective ads for holding my attention (although not longer than four hours) are the Avodart museum miniature model ads.

When I grow up, I would love to work in a museum creating exhibits. Museums always feel like home to me. So even though the actor has to make frequent trips to the restroom, I think he's got a cool job.

My small sons loved the army miniatures at the 45th Infantry Museum, and the great model railroad layouts at the Omniplex in Oklahoma City and the Union Pacific museum in downtown Omaha. Their all-time greatest hit was the huge miniature model at the Alamo. When will the Avodart guy remember the Alamo??? Maybe the next ads will feature the prostrate actor creating a miniature Iraq for the Bush Library!

Just what is the tag line for the commercial? Our hypothetical language-learning family and I can never decide if the man has a going problem, a growing problem, or a groin problem. Learning English on t.v. is going to be grueling.


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Migration in a handbasket

Lucy Locket

Lost her pocket
Kitty Fisher found it
Nothing in it
Nothing in it
But the binding round it

It's a bad sign when two people ask me the same day about the meaning of "to hell in a handbasket." It could be further evidence of the impending apocalypse, but then again it might just be clutchless artisan-roasted beans jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Years ago a coworker convinced me a "handbasket" was the woven repository of thieves' hands chopped off as punishment on a precinct-by-precinct judgment day. Such a visual image! Sort of like the bucket of slippery bluegills, sunfish, and bullheads after a nice day fishing the dredged lakes near Lincoln, but with heavier Biblical overtones.

Best as I can find, the expression "to hell in a handbasket" is just over a century old, and it's closely akin to "going to heaven in a wheelbarrow". A "handbasket" is just a basket with a handle. The term is similar to "handbag," and of the same vintage. Going to either hell or heaven in a handbasket just meant getting there rapidly, portably, and easily.

My apocryphal ancestor, "The Unknown Liska", allegedly walked from the Ukraine to Bohemia with a wheelbarrow. He probably didn't think the trip was rapid or easy. Some versions of this family tale have him pushing his portable mother in the wheelbarrow, and she is clutching her pocketbook. I can see her now, with her nylons sliding down in rolls around her ankles (and her hair done up on pink rollers!).

Nobody calls their purse a handbag now. My grandma used to call her purse a "pocketbook". She had some really groovy crocheted and beaded drawstring bags. These days the term "pocketbook" usually refers to your [always limited] financial resources as in "prices to fit your pocketbook".

A-tisket a-tasket

A green and yellow basket

I wrote a letter to my love

And on the way I dropped it

I dropped it, I dropped it

Yes, on the way I dropped it

A little girlie picked it up

And took it to the market

--obviously that little girl was the aforementioned Kitty Fisher. An apoplectic apocalyptic moment came when my second-graders told me about their on-line chat room. YIKES!



During preschool group time I read the kids a Joanne Ryder book and talked about wild birds flying south for the winter. No, the kids insisted, they fly Southwest. Wanna get away?

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Preschool Geographic

"Hey, look at these boombahs!," one kindergarten boy told another. "Wow!," said his friend. They were sitting side-by-side in the library looking at a book.

Was this a flashback to my Sixties male classmates pouring over National Geographic pages to marvel at large, dangling gender differences? Yikes! I'm not sure I want the preschoolers discovering this stuff while I'm overseeing after-lunch free time.

Was it a case of phonic huh-huh-hubba-buh-buh-bubba? I tuh-tuh-tuh-tippy-toed up behind the boys, who were still gazing appreciatively at the picture.

"Guys," I said in my most Jane Goodall-ish voice. "Those animals are called baboons, not boombahs." [There must be an inflection of "dudes" to convey this information!] "Oh, yeah," they remembered.

:

Baboons who live in the African plains spend about one-third of their time sleeping, and when awake they divide their time between travelling, finding and eating food, and free leisure time - which basically consists of interacting, or grooming each other's fur to pick out lice. It's not a very exciting life, yet not much has changed in the million years since humans evolved out of common simian ancestors. The requirements of life still dictate that we spend our time in a way that is not that different from the African baboons. Give or take a few hours, most people sleep for one-third of the day, and use the remainder to work, travel, and rest in more or less the same proportions as the baboons do. And as the historian Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie has shown, in thirteenth-century French villages - which were among the most advanced in the world at the time - the most common leisure pursuit was still that of picking lice out of each other's hair. Now, of course, we have television.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, from Flow.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Seven veils of Salome stuck to your shoe

You're interviewing for a job, and realize your fly is unzipped. You're walking down the red carpet at the Academy Awards, and someone yells that you have toilet paper stuck to your shoe. You are trying on bras at Home Depot! Yes, all these are the stuff of nightmares--yours, mine, and my walking buddy's.

An inconsiderate person has moved out of an office near my school and left tons of stuff in and around our dumpster--desks, computers, boxes, printers, holiday popcorn tins, paper, a door... The regular trash bags are piled up on top of all this junk, and the wind is gusting up to forty miles per hour.

The Tuesday garbage truck arrives and empties the dumpster. Somehow one of those continuous-feed multi-form printer paper stacks gets wrapped around one wheel. The paper just keeps unfolding and trailing along behind the garbage truck like toilet paper stuck to a giant's shoe! As the truck lumbers through the neighborhood, the paper flaps and twirls in an impressive dance.

I'm thinking about seductive, nightmarish dances with trailing and twirling diaphanous veils because the Dallas Opera is about to perform Richard Strauss's "Salome". How will the opera be staged? What creative visual interpretations will be imposed on this intense music? I pray it won't be updated to our current time with veils of Bounce, Charmin, duct tape, and printer paper! What would Mr. Whipple do?

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Dude inflections

I love the Bud Light "Dude" ads. The target audience is males 20-30 years old, but the ads resonate with mommies of the target audience. Having lived with three frequently monosyllabic sons, and hosted their friends for so long, I don't speak or necessarily understand their utterances, but I do recognize the language when I hear it.

The ads are like having my guys home for sixty seconds. There must be a perfect guy to roommate "dude" inflection that conveys the concept that your mom called and left a long message on the machine asking you to phone home. Bet it's accompanied by an eye-roll.

One son emailed me the A- Slate ad report card for "Dude". I give the ads an A, as I've personally retained the brand name Bud Light in my faulty menopausal memory banks, AND even purchased some Bud Light to have in the fridge in case a dude comes home.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

SALT Talks After New Years

"You guys are fat!," I told my feet. "You, too, fingers! It's time to cut out the salt. You can't go around looking like grubworms, eating chips and salsa at all hours of the day and night!"

It was a darn good pep talk. I could give it in a locker room at SMU for the salary June Jones accepted to rebuild the Mustang football team. I like June Jones and his UHawaii style of football. Having Mike Leach and June Jones both in the Lone Star State could be interesting.

News broadcasts in the late Sixties droned on and on about the SALT Talks. Water retention was not the topic. Seems like much of the time I was unsure of the topic! You take the quiz--to a kid, these were mysterious entities:

U Thant
UFO
GOP
DQ
DMV
DMZ
DWI
Cold War
Iodized salt
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
Assistant DA
AP
UPI
LP
ICBM
Big 8
Top 40
Sinai
Gaza Strip
OB-GYN
SAC
Sack the QB
Blitz
Zip Code
USSR
YWCA
KFMQ
When it rains it pours

Tonight I'm puzzling about the tiny plates in the set of Bavarian china. Six of the eight are in good shape. As best I can remember, these little plates are for salt. They are smaller than the bread and butter plates. Maybe I am confusing them with cut glass salt cellars. My searching for table setting information hasn't yielded any clarification, iodized or otherwise. I feel like a Miller and Paine Charm School failure!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Who Do You Mute, Arlene?

I walk 47 miles of barbed wire,
I use a cobra-snake for a necktie,
I got a brand new house on the roadside,
Made from rattlesnake hide,
I got a brand new chimney made on top,
Made out of a human skull,
Now come on take a walk with me, Arlene,
And tell me, who do you love?

Don't diddley around in the recliner with your remote control, Dad! Be decisive. Mute the damn fools! Take the wind out of their annoying full-of-hot-air sails. "Ask your doctor if..." hitting the mute button on your remote control might relieve symptoms caused by overexposure to Sally Field with her once-a-month Boniva; to the Geico caveman with his nervous breakdown; to all those actors shrinking their prostates, erecting their dysfunctions, or being so superficial as to imagine gray hair ruined their relationship and forced them back "into the game".

Who do you mute?

I had the great good fortune to hear Bo Diddley perform in a small Oklahoma City club many years ago. I hope Bo's remote control is made of rattlesnake hide, and that he hits that mute button whenever Brian Williams of NBC's Nightly News narrates those near tragic/perky rescue pet stories for the blue-haired condo/dachsund-owners demographic.

Ask your doctor if using the television remote mute button is covered by Medicare and your supplemental Medi-gap insurance.




© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

My bologna has a lunchpail

The new preschooler brings a "b'lonely sandwich" in his lunchpail most days. He's a happy little eater, but it still brings a tear to my eye. Each time he says, "b'lonely," I remember watching the little petunia on Captain Kangaroo 's version of I'm a Lonely Little Petunia In an Onion Patch wiping her eyes with her leaf arms:

Of all the saddest words
That I have ever heard
The saddest is the story
Told me by a bird
He had spent about an hour
Chatting with a flower
and here ís the tale the flower told --

I'm a lonely little petunia in an onion patch, an onion patch, an onion patch
I'm a lonely little petunia in an onion patch and all I do is cry all day
Boo hoo, boo hoo
The air ís so strong it takes my breath away
I'm a lonely little petunia in an onion patch, oh won't you come and play with me

Strolling through Whole Foods last weekend I chanced upon a display of Onion Goggles for sale. Already having a set of swim goggles and being allergic to onions, I didn't check the price tag. I can't really visualize Julia Child wearing Onion Goggles. She would look like the French Fearless Fly Chef.



Only B' lonely springs next to my memory blanks' hit parade:

(r.orbison/melson)
Dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah
Ooh-yay-yay-yay-yeah
Oh-oh-oh-oh-wah
Only the lonely
Only the lonely (dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah)
Know the way I feel tonight (ooh-yay-yay-yay-yeah)
Only the lonely (dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah)
Know this feelin ain't right (dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah)
There goes my baby
There goes my heart
They're gone forever
So far apart
But only the lonely
Know whyI cry
Only the lonely
Dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah
Ooh-yay-yay-yay-yeah
Oh-oh-oh-oh-wah
Only the lonely
Only the lonely
Know the heartaches I've been through
Only the lonely
Know I cried and cried for you
Maybe tomorrow
A new romance
No more sorrow
But thats the chance - you gotta take
If your lonely heart breaks
Only the lonely
Dum-dum-dum-dumdy-doo-wah

Baloney
slang for "nonsense," 1922, Amer.Eng. (popularized 1930s by N.Y. Gov. Alfred E. Smith), from earlier sense of "idiot" (probably influenced by blarney), usually regarded as being from bologna sausage, a type traditionally made from odds and ends, named for the city in Italy.
bologna
1850, variant of bologna sausage (1596), named for the city in Italy, formerly Bononia. See baloney.


© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Our next contestant

"Guess My Salad" is back after a brief summer hiatus. The returning preschoolers started the game today, just as soon as I unzipped my thermal lunch bag. The ratings weren't as high as the Sopranos finale or the NBA finals, but the small demographic audience loved it. Some of the new students caught on, and offered their guesses--cheese, carrots, cherries?

I may have to create a spinoff of "Cheese and Cracker Squares":

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Magic Ovens

"Gooschy Bread" was the name my younger sibling gave to Wonder Bread* back when we were growing to 90% of our adult height and eating lots of peanut butter sandwiches. We were building strong bodies 12 ways with a product that was almost as good as Play-doh for molding and didn't dry out as quickly.

When I saw the photos of items created by a 3-D printer known as Desktop Factory in the May fifth New York Times story, "Beam It Down From the Web, Scotty", I remembered shaping the Wonder Bread. Why didn't we ever think to bake the gooschy bread in the Creepy Crawler Thingmaker molds by Mattel? It would have been cheaper than Plastigoop, and just as edible!



What is 3-D printing? You put a picture of a pizza into the machine, and a real pizza comes out hot and ready to eat...Close, but not exactly. According to the Desktop Factory website, a 3-D printer "turns digital data from computer-aided design (CAD) programs, 3D graphics and animation software, and scanners into sturdy physical models." This process is "commonly referred to as 'rapid prototyping'." And here I thought that was something police weren't supposed to do.

It's still easier and cheaper to obtain a vintage Easy Bake Oven or a Mattel Vac-U-Form, but prices for 3-D printers will be dropping below $5000 soon:

Bill Gross, chairman of IdeaLab, says the technology it has developed, which uses a halogen light bulb to melt nylon powder, will allow the price of the printers to fall to $1,000 in four years. “We are Easy-Bake Ovening a 3-D model,” he said. “The really powerful thing about this idea is that the fundamental engineering allows us to make it for $300 in materials.”

In 1963: America's first working toy oven, was turquoise and had a carrying handle and fake stove top. It was invented by designers at Kenner Products (now a division of Hasbro). In its first year, over 500,000 lucky kids talked their parents into spending $15.95. By its fifth birthday, the EASY-BAKE Oven was a household name.



The toy oven used an ordinary light bulb as a heat source. I didn't have one, of course, but the first kid on our block did, and we were invited over to make brownies that tasted like cardboard. She had the Chatty Cathy doll and the Schwinn Stingray bicycle with banana seat, too. Still, it was an era of amazing possibilities and turquoise Ford Mustangs...



Our first molding model experience was creating a hollow rubber model of a Mercury space capsule using a science kit my dad got at the toy store and saved for a snow day. I still have the mold, and use it as twin paperweights. (Many things in my house fall into the euphemistic "paperweight" category.)



We had a Mattel Vac-U-Form/ThingMaker, a toy for molding little plastic race cars and burning ourselves on the 110-volt hotplate. We also made lots of Creepy Crawlers, Creeple People, and Fun Flowers. I don't know why we never baked fishhooks into the Creepy Crawlers to make our own artificial bait. At the neighbors' we could make Incredible Edibles out of Gobble-Di-Goop, and those were as tasty as the Easy Bake brownies.



Vac-U-Form enabled you to melt a sheet of styrene plastic and quickly make a mold of any item. This toy is not only desired by collectors, but by model makers to make molds of small parts. The original styrene sheets, called "Material Paks" are difficult to find these days. "You can tell it's Mattel, it's swell."

*The term "Wonder Years" was coined by the Continental Baking Corp. (Wonder is now made by Interstate Bakeries Corp.) in conjunction with its "help build strong bodies 12 ways" advertising campaign. Wonder Bread defines the "wonder years" as ages one through 12, when children grow to 90% of their adult height.

By 1967 I was in junior high. The magic of ovens was being replaced by 4-H and Home Ec class. I trudged home each afternoon to eat French Vanilla Creme cookies (made by Keebler, I think), and watch Perry Mason, Star Trek, and Gilligan's Island reruns before doing homework for an hour or two.

The original Keebler "jingle" reads like this: "Man, you never would believe where the Keebler® Cookies come from. They're baked by little elves in a hollow tree. And what do you think makes these cookies so uncommon? They're baked in magic ovens, and there's no factory. Hey!" (Lyrics by Tom Shutter, copywriter, Leo Burnett, 1967)

I'm sure owning a home version of a rapid prototyping 3-D printer is just around the corner. I know it will be just as useful as the office laminator at the hardware store where the teen evening staff encases pizza slices and cockroaches...Incredible Edibles and Creepy Crawlers!

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Oh, Gorsh!

My youngest student, when reminded to flush and wash, says, "Oh, Gorsh!," with his hands on his face. He mutters, "Goll durn it," while he tries to straighten out his jeans that got turned sideways in the stall, then marches back in to push the handle that causes that loud, scary flushing noise.



Oh, gorsh! I remember the coin-operated bucking bronco at the Hinky Dinky gorshrey store. Occasionally Mom would give us money to ride the horse while she pushed her shopping cart around getting the Campbell's cream of mushroom, Weaver's potato chips, Sorry Charlie tuna, charcoal bricquets, and shattered wheat cereal for my Dad. Usually we just rode on the metal railings between the checkout lines near the display of mittens, ice-scrapers, and accordian-folded clear plastic rain "bonnets" in their handy carrying cases.

Mom got the huge round cartons of All detergent for the worshing machine. We used the cartons as horses when we played cowboys in the basement while Mom sewed and ironed. We slapped the backs of our pretend horses because the Father of Our Country had a "slapping stallion". It was very embarrassing when I learned to spell and found out George was Washington, not Warshington. And so, spelling became a civilizing force in This Great Country of Ours.

Of course a horse is a horse. Maybe Mr. Ed should run for president, and corral that bunch up in Warshington:

Go right to the source and ask the horse
He’ll give you the answer that you’ll endorse.
He’s always on a steady course.
Talk to Mister Ed.


There was Captain Washington
Upon a slapping stallion
A-giving orders to his men
I guess there was a million.

Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Mind the music and the step
And with the girls be handy. *

For decades I've been confused thinking the Marx Toy spring-action riding Mustang was "Marvo". The Sixties were a groovy, marvy time. The mangled ad jingle pops into my mind whenever I watch Dubya down at the Crawford ranch:

Marvo the Mustang; he's almost For Real!

I'm set straight now. It was "Marvel the Mustang". Marvel has his own virtual online museum. The current retro remakes don't get very good reviews from toy-buying grandparents. Seems things get less "for real" all the time. Oh, gorsh!

* (Sounds like a Viagra ad!)

Sell No Clem Before Its Rind

Back in the Seventies, Orson Welles did some television commercials for Paul Masson jug wine, in which he uttered the tag line, "Paul Masson will sell no wine... before its time."

Drying clementines for use in ornamental wreaths takes more time than anticipated. I'd been air-drying the fruit for a week or so when I got frustrated. That's it! These Lil Cuties are going in the oven at 170 degrees for about twelve hours. I'm going to stick some whole cloves into their little vampire hearts, too.

Okay, they are a little bit cute. Back in Camp Fire Girls, we would have spray-painted them gold and added many folded Readers' Digests.






© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder

Do your John Houseman imitation

We sort blogs the old fashioned way, WITTTH PAPER. I'm chasing paper, and trying to find the reason I've been writing this blog for three and a half years. It's been an extremely satisfying outlet, but now what? What would I have if I sorted out the 999 posts by subject?

And so I sort between more pressing efforts. It's a low-tech project involving print-outs, scissors, highlighter, and stapler. Professor Kingsfield is peering down his nose at my mere mortal approach. Playing the mental roles of God, father, professor, judge, critic, mentor, junior high principal, or conscience, John Houseman voices imperious internal expectations and evaluations.

The Paper Chase was a novel, then a movie and a t.v. series, about an Ivy League law school and Professor Kingsfield in the Seventies. Houseman was a contemporary of Orson Welles, but he may be best remembered for the Smith Barney ad campaign of 1979-1986, with the line, "We make money the old-fashioned way, we eaaarrrn it!”

One son really does not like the NPR voice of authority, Carl Kasell. You may have other suggestions for The Voice of Authority. Besides Houseman and Kasell, I vote for Walter Cronkite and James Earl Jones.

It isn't raining rain, you know

...it's opening our doors. Thank heaven for a wonderful day of steady, gentle rain. Since about three this morning it has been soaking into our parched soil. This is the best gift we could receive for Labor Day. Our labors hauling soaker hoses around our homes to water our foundations have gotten a reprieve.

Texas foundations still annoy me, although I've lived atop this clay soil for sixteen years. We've landed a man on the moon. We've built earthquake-resistant buildings in California and Japan. Lowe's is selling Katrina Cottages for hurricane regions. You would think we could build homes to withstand the shifting clay soils of North Texas.

Want to know when your teen arrives home late at night? Move to North Texas! No door will ever open without a loud grating sound that would wake any mama. Worried about security? Any burglar who attempts to budge the front door will be in the emergency room with shoulder injuries. We don't get carpal tunnel syndrome. We get portal struggle syndrome.

Some parts of the country are believing the old Morton Salt slogan, "When it rains it pours." The world seems upside down with flooding in El Paso and in the Hatch valley of southwest New Mexico. Maybe Al Gore has it right when he talks about our extreme weather in recent years being related to global warming.

An alternate explanation for our extreme weather may be that normally sane people have begun to do the unthinkable. Yes! Folks have started throwing away their accumulated of National Geographic magazines.

Your mom told you not to ever, ever, ever cut pictures out of the "National G" about the same time she taught you not to run with scissors. Your father assumed a bearing of gravitas when he explained that it is each generation's duty to retain and add to the family's chronologically arranged collection of The National Geographic. Unfortunately, he didn't explain why.

It was many years later when I first heard what I thought was a joke:

If everyone threw away their National Gs, the earth's axis would shift, the poles would reverse, the force of gravity would be altered, and the planet would be thrown out of its orbit.

We slapped our knees and said, "Woo-hoo, that's a good one!"

It got so libraries and schools didn't accept donations of National Gs. Half Price Books wouldn't pay you for them, even after you hauled them up from the basement, loaded them into the trunk, drove across town to the store, and hoisted them up to the sales counter. It was darn right discouraging, and so you said, to heck with your father's warning. You threw them in the nearest dumpster. Who could blame you?

I hear creaking and moaning. The sounds of an axis shifting. Tsunami and cataclysm, deluge and other spelling words! I hear Pluto's faint voice across the redefined solar system explaining that Plutonians had arrogantly discarded their amassed National Geographics. I hear similar bubbly warnings from the submerged sages of Atlantis.

The creaking and moaning are actually the sounds of my fireplace trying to migrate from this condo to the one across the parking lot. The building is twisting like a wrung-out wash cloth. I'm not alone, as the Dallas Morning News reports in "Foundation Firms See a Shift in Business". The whole region is cracking and creaking. It's a mess.

Amassed magazines might provide a solution. Those heavy stacks dating back before Sputnik could be used to weigh down our concrete slabs, or submerged under the foundation as recycled periodical piers. Put down those scissors. I'm being serious here!



Gravitas is from the Latin gravitas, "heaviness, seriousness," from gravis, "heavy, serious."

"What's that aftershave you're wearing?"

I'm going to a big happening tomorrow, by my standards, so I had my hair repaired last evening--sort of a lube and tune, with a Maaco $39.99 paint job. It's sad that I put beauty treatments in the same mental category as oil changes.

Under the hot dryer for prolonged periods of Hot Carnuba hair reconditioning, I got to fantasizing about a Sam and Janet Evening with Prince Charming and glass slippers. Across a crowded room Emile de Becque asked me, "What's that fragrance you're wearing?"

"What's that aftershave you're wearing?," was the slogan for Hai Karate t.v. commercials back in my Wonder Bread years. Nerdy guys wearing dork glasses required martial arts training to fight off over-sexed chicks in a memorable ad campaign. Hai Karate was up against the Mennen Skin Bracer ads involving a slap, and a "Thanks, I needed that!"

That fragrance I'm wearing is actually Aroma de Fabric Crayon Drawings. My students use Crayola Fabric Crayons to make a drawing, and I iron the drawing onto their tie-dyed camp t-shirts. After ironing fifty-six transfers, I can't get that smell out of my head..., or my clothes, or my hair! Will Emile de Becque whisper in my ear that I smell just like an unairconditioned first grade classroom when second semester used to last well into June? Grilled Binney & Smith with hints of dried bath towel! Great. I could probably attract some sixty-ish male who never quite got over the crush on his first-grade teacher!

My hair looks like it was transformed with Crayola Multicultural Washable Markers (aka brown felt pens). I've got your raw sienna, burnt sienna, raw umber, burnt umber, and yellow ochre!




The fabric crayon instructions:

Turn crayon drawings into colorful fabric art. Simply draw with these special formula crayons (on paper). Iron onto fabric for brilliant, permanent fabric designs. Works best on white fabric, synthetic blends.

Use to make personalized T-shirts, fabric quilts, tablecloths, pillowcases, banners, kites, aprons, scarves, kitchen accessories, and holiday decorations. Drawing, rubbings, stenciling and lettering techniques are easy to do.

8-count box contains: magenta, violet, burnt sienna, blue, orange, green, black and yellow.

Please have an adult use the iron.

I'm that adult.

Knock! Knock! Who's there?
Sam and Janet! Sam and Janet who?
Sam and Janet evening?

Emile:
Some enchanted evening
When you find your true love,
When you feel her call you
Across a crowded room,
Then fly to her side,
And make her your own
For all through your life you
May dream all alone.

Nellie:
Once you have found her,
Never let her go.

Emile:
Once you have found her,
Never let her go!

Collagemama:
Once you have colored it,
Never let it grow!

Vocabulary PLUS history and home ec. at no extra charge

These aren't exactly Thursday words because they don't come from my young students. I still rated them worthy of note:

Cosmellision specialists are the technicians who can make your automohicularvebile all dent-free and painted just as purdy and sparkly as your toenails at the salon after your car crash. I would never have known about the art and science of cosmellision if I hadn't watched the local television commercials in Lincoln, Nebraska.

In my family it is quite normal to be asked, "Was anyone else was hurt in that accident?," when you show up at the breakfast table with bad bedhead. Remember those ribcord bedspreads from the Sears & Roebuck catalog? Nothing like falling asleep and waking up with one cheek all striped!



It might be better to climb under the covers next time. As a kid I enjoyed going to bed between fresh, clean, stiff sheets that had dried outside on the clothesline. The very best were the pink sheets for the brass bed at Grandma's house.

Most of my art students have never seen a clothespin before, let alone smelled clothes, sheets, and towels dried "out on the line". Just saying those words brings the remembered fresh laundry scent to life in my memory. Research indicates that olfactory memories are both our earliest formed and our last lost in life. Olfactory memories are usually linked to emotional memories. The scent memory of the line-dried pink sheets at Grandma's house evokes a wonderful sense of being loved, cherished, connected to family and neighbors, and tuned into the constant buzz of insects outside the window screens.

To a cataloging library person, a SEE ALSO* reference is the gift of many new lamps for old. Maybe our most primitive brain functions as a SCENT ALSO reference linking good food and family memories at a level so deep we rarely realize the connections. That might be the power of steamy, savory aromas of our comfort foods. If we were under siege, the scent memory of a baked potato with butter, pepper, and garlic sour cream would make me feel safe.

A World Cup announcer informed me that one team was "under seizure". Sure hope he meant "under siege here"! Could be a case of SIEGE ALSO:

*In some cases, “See also” or “See” entries appear when you enter a search. You will most often get “see also” and “See” entries when you have entered a subject search. These entries refer to Subject Headings that help you find items of interest when there are many possible words or terms used for one topic or when the term you entered is not an official Library of Congress Subject Heading. A “See” is a heading actually used in a full record. Click on that heading to redirect your search. A “see also” is another heading used in full records for other titles that may be of interest. Click on that heading to execute the same search with this new search term.

It's been a long day. Think I'll have a baked potato with all the toppings, then crawl into bed.

Use your head to choose presidential library site

In my gratitude journal I am thanking my lucky stars my name isn't Letitia Fitch. Letitia was the first wife of Iowa millionaire Fred W. Fitch, the shampoo mogul. In 1892 he whomped up a snake-oil concoction to market in hand-blown glass bottles as the "Ideal Hair Grower and Dandruff Cure". Fred and Letitia separated in 1923, and divorced in 1926, by which time Fitch was living with Gertrude, a former maid twenty-four years his junior. We will restrain ourselves from saying he was scratching that itch. In 1946 the FTC decided that dandruff was not an abnormal condition, and therefore could not be cured, improving many folks' self-esteem. *

My dad has been singing the Fitch shampoo jingle all week. Are you ready?

Don't despair,
Use your head,
Save your hair!
Use Fitch Shampoo!

If it itches
Use Fitch's!


The jingle was performed by Tommy Dorsey, Guy Lombardo, Benny Goodman, and others on the "Fitch Bandwagon" radio show. It would make a terrific campaign song for Texas' own incumbent Governor Goodhair, Republican Rick Perry. The Fitch product line was eventually sold to Bristol-Myers, the company that brought us Body On Tap shampoo with beer, and the warning not to take internally.


I brought the jingle singing on myself by telling Dad that I woke up one morning with a song from the 1968 movie version of the 1947 musical (with Fred Astaire and Petula Clark!), "Finian's Rainbow", stuck in my head:

When the idle poor
Become the idle rich
You'll never know
Just who is who
Or who is which.

Won't it be rich
When everyone's poor relative
Becomes a "Rockefellative",
And palms no longer itch--
What a switch!...

...And when all your neighbors
Are upper class
You won't know your 'Georges'
From your 'Astors'.

Ah, yes! Sylvestor McMonkey McBean of The Sneetches Star-Off Machine helps all the folks in Bush/Perry country believe they are equals down on the beaches at those frankfurter roasts. These guys are so Head and Shoulders above the rest.



Out in Lubbock folks are crying real, wet tears today because their proposal has been eliminated from consideration for the Dubya Presidential Library (with Speak & Spell!). The tears are fighting grass fires in the drought-stricken areas of west Texas. This might be the most beneficial thing Dubya has accomplished in his presidency.

...West Texans had pledged to raise more than $300 million for the library. They said Thursday they were disappointed but not particularly surprised that their bid had foundered.
"We regret it. But it's a big decision, and I respect it," said Mike Weiss, longtime friend of the first couple who served as co-chair of the West Texas coalition. "I always thought we were kind of a long shot.
"Most people knew we kind of had a geographical disadvantage and it was going to be hard to overcome."...

SMU and UD in Dallas have also made proposals for the No President Left Behind Library, but I am worried neither one has enough land available for the Brush Clearing Institute.



*Jun. 10, 1946
"You've got a very bad head condition," says the barber delicately.

"Dandruff, you mean?" says the victim in the chair.

Solemnly the barber nods, solemnly picks up a bottle. . . .