Now that the whole beard phenomenon is dying down I suspect the next big thing will be sideburns. Only I don’t think they should be called “sideburns”. Who wants burns of any kind on their face? I think they should be called “cheekstaches”. Or “earbrows”.
I suspect this is the name of a local graffiti artist, or the tag for a gang whose members are really big Fleetwood Mac fans.
Also I always used to mishear the line “Why don’t you ask him who’s the latest on his throne?” as “Why don’t you ask him when it’s gonna storm? Hey, it makes about as much sense as the rest of the lyrics.
Beach House Rules.
Thank you for staying in our beach house! We hope you enjoy your stay and want you to feel welcome but have a few simple rules for your safety and convenience. We want each stay to be as pleasant as possible for all our guests.
The wifi password is cocoAnuts.
Please lock both the front and back doors and set the alarm any time you leave the house, even in the off season.
The house security code is 4560404540631415926908. You’ll need to enter this to set and turn off the alarm when you come in or go out.
Deck tables and chairs must stay on the deck.
Do not bring any sand into the house. The cleanup fee for sand is $25. This is double if it’s in the refrigerator.
Feel free to use the plates made from rare vinyl albums, but remember: they are NOT dishwasher safe!
The emperor sized bed in the master suite can safely hold 23 people or 3500 pounds.
Put your beach towels in the hamper in the closet across from the laundry room. A hazmat team will take care of these after you leave.
The rope ladders in the bathroom closet are long enough to reach from the deck to the beach in the event of an emergency.
You’ll see spectacular meteor showers if you’re here in May and June. The house is built to withstand these, but we don’t recommend lingering outside.
Do not eat the crabs you find on the beach no matter how much they beg. It’s a parasite that makes them act that way.
Only eat the jellyfish in months with an “L” in them.
You won’t need to go into the attic that can be accessed from a trapdoor in the ceiling of the children’s bedroom and reached by the folding ladder conveniently placed behind the door. If you do we recommend against opening or even touching the mermaid music box you’ll find on the left side of the vanity table at the southwest corner of the house.
The merman music box on the vanity table at the northeast corner of the house is safe to open.
Do NOT feed the seagulls. They’ll come back in greater and greater numbers. We’ve lost too many guests that way.
We have fully stocked the drawers with cutlery, but if you need anything most of what you need can be purchased at the gas station, unless you need more ammo. You can get that at Sid’s, next door to the gas station. Tell Mike at the gas station to call and let Sid know you’re coming.
Do not go to Sid’s without getting Mike to call first. We’ve lost too many guests that way.
Always take a buddy when you go swimming. We keep a spare locked in the storage shed.
Do NOT taunt the dolphins.
Do not go off and leave the dryer running.
This big ball of string is from my days working in the mailroom. Packages would arrive tied up with string. I saved it because you never know when you might need string.
Revelations that boredom can be beneficial always remind me of a piece I wrote back in 1996 about the time I dangled a pink hippo out of a 7th floor window. Looking back at that piece I realize there were so many interesting details I left out, so it’s worth revisiting.
This is a ridiculously inaccurate recreation of the original hippo which is long gone with the coworker who owned it.
Why was the hippo pink? It was a furry stuffed animal and supposedly the fur had been treated with cobalt chloride. The coworker who owned it said it would turn blue if rain was imminent and pink on clear days. Actually she had it backwards—dry cobalt chloride is blue and wet cobalt chloride is pink. That explains why we never could get it to turn blue, even though I put it under a running tap and also licked it. Maybe if we’d put it in the oven it would have changed color.
I finally got it to turn blue!
Still it was the belief that it would turn blue that first prompted me to dangle it out the window. Wanting to see whether my big ball of string would reach the ground from the 7th floor was secondary. It was while unrolling my big ball of string, of course, that I discovered I’d failed to tie the first three feet or so to the rest of the ball. The hippo plummeted into the bushes below.
After the hippo took a dive I switched to using a pen as a weight because I didn’t want to risk my coworker’s toy hippo. The pen was also slightly heavier, and I thought this would provide a more accurate reading. It had gone at least seven or eight feet when someone on the 6th floor reached out and grabbed it. When I pulled back they started yelling, “Hello! Hello! Who’s up there?”
I should have explained previously that the 6th floor of the building is a parking garage. It’s where people went to smoke, unless you were the mailman, and then you smoked in the 7th floor hallway next to the mailroom where only delivery people went. That way you could crush your cigarettes into the linoleum floor, but that’s another story.
I have nothing against smokers, but in retrospect I feel I was being unfairly judged by the person who grabbed the pen. I assume they assumed they had the moral high ground. They were attempting to stop someone engaged in something more foolish and unproductive than sitting in a parking garage smoking. This is because they sounded angry. What was the problem? Maybe they were one of the people who worked for the Jack Daniel’s distributor on the 10th floor. They were always kind of standoffish and snappish even though they had tons of whiskey in their office. I know this because they regularly gave free bottles of it to delivery people who in turn would pass it on to me. Before the distributor moved to another building I had enough Jack Daniel’s to last months years.
The final element that makes this story worth revisiting is something I couldn’t provide at the time I first wrote it: illustrations. Now you can see where it all went down.
Yes, yes, I know we shouldn’t listen in on other peoples’ conversations. Even catching snippets of other peoples’ conversations when walking by is rude, but what can you do? If I could I wouldn’t even accidentally overhear what other people are saying. But the I might miss the woman on her cell phone saying, “Yes, we can all fit in a singular vehicle.”
I guess the really rude thing would have been to stop and say, hey, I’m a big fan of singular vehicles. Can I see yours?
“Don’t run in the house! You’ll make my cake fall!”
My mother would yell this at me sometimes and I’d immediately come skidding to a stop. Then I’d spend the rest of the day creeping quietly around the house because I didn’t want to ruin the promise of cake. Even if it was just for company I knew I’d get at least a slice if I were good.
Then I started thinking it was a control thing because it wasn’t just running in the house.
“Don’t come in with that dirt on your shoes. You’ll make my cake fall!”
“Take that jar of bugs outside. You’ll make my cake fall!”
“Turn off those Godzilla movies! They’ll make my cake fall!”
Sometimes it even seemed like there was no cake. And I’ve never found out what happens if a cake falls. My best guess is that you get a flat, dense cake. Maybe that’s how brownies were invented.
For a time when I was a kid soufflés were also haute cuisine, which translates as “hot cuisine” if you don’t speak French. And I remember they’d fall too, but they were even worse than cakes. A soufflé would fall if you swore, breathed too hard, or looked at it cross-eyed. Maybe that’s why nobody makes soufflés anymore. They kept falling and eventually that was how quiche was invented.
If you do speak French je suis perdu. Ou es le Metro? Merde. Mais cela est une autre histoire.
He was heavyset with a languid look but leaned forward in his seat. He spoke with a deep, low voice. I don’t remember how we got started talking, but I’m pretty sure he initiated the conversation since one of the first things he said was “You wouldn’t believe some bands I’ve worked with.”
“Try me,” I said.
He stared for a long time then said, “I won’t name names.” Then why did you even bring it up? I thought. He continued. “I’ll just say I used to tour with some boys who worked for Apple Records.”
The name Apple Records bounced around in my consciousness looking for something to connect to. If he’d said Konk Studios or dropped a name like David Watts that would have meant something to me, but I shrugged. I didn’t know Apple Records.
“Four mophead boys from Liverpool,” he said slowly.
Bingo. I knew, somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind that Apple Records was the label founded by The Beatles, but it wasn’t anywhere easily accessed. Hey, The Beatles are great, but I just don’t give them a lot of thought.
He got off a few stops before I did. When the doors closed the bus driver said, “He’s so full of shit his eyes are brown. He’s never been anywhere near The Beatles.” There’s a reason Nashville is called Music City. Within walking distance of where I work there are blocks and blocks of recording studios and music industry offices. I’ve never been in the industry myself but I’ve done temp jobs alongside people who worked as backup musicians for some of the biggest names in the industry. The odds here of actually being on a bus with either Paul McCartney or Ringo Starr are better than average. And yet I believed the bus driver. She knew without even looking that the guy had brown eyes.
He had me at “Shut up!” I was sixteen, spending the night at a friends’ house, and we were watching the Montreal Just For Laughs Festival being broadcast on HBO. Several comedians cracked us up, but the one who really got my attention was Bing Hitler. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before. He was aggressive and made loony jokes about worms, bees, wasps. I had no way to find out anything more about this guy but it didn’t matter. I was a fan for life.
Five years later a friend who’d been brought up in England played me a tape of a couple of stand-up routines by this guy named Craig Ferguson. He did a whole bit about two Scottish families on Family Fortunes (Britain’s version of Family Feud) that had me in tears. I didn’t know anything else about him but I was a fan for life.
It never occurred to me to wonder why they sounded similar until I heard Ferguson asked about his original stage name Bing Hitler in an interview.
When he took over The Late Late Show he gained a whole new group of fans, but I get a special feeling knowing I was there almost from the beginning.
Happy birthday Craig Ferguson.
Bathroom graffiti is always the most vile, deranged, racist, bigoted, homophobic stuff you’ll find. At least that’s the case most of the time. Once I saw a phone number with the obligatory “call for a good time”, but under that someone had written, “No! Don’t! Gives terrible blow jobs!” That still makes me laugh.
And then there was this that I captured in an Alabama rest stop.
It’s etched into the mirror which took someone a lot of time and effort. It can be a little hard to read even if you click the picture to embiggen it, so I’ve done my best to recreate it:
I would assume this was some kind of white supremacy statement if not for the peace symbol. Maybe the halo and the triangle that gives the N an upward pointing arrow is a memorial to someone named Saxon. If that’s the case I think it’s a nice tribute, and one that will last longer than most graffiti. You can’t paint over the mirror or scrub that off.
Completely unrelated: The Bloggess spotted some much more hilarious graffiti. That’s one more reason it’s such a shame office supply stores all over the place are closing. For a little comfort here’s another bit of graffiti from a restaurant bathroom:
“The increasingly abundant use of emojis across cultures and age groups — and the similar meanings we assign them — suggest we’re entering an era of hybrid communication, as we treat pictures like a real language.”-NPR, All Things Considered, May 4, 2015.
Source: Wikipedia