I’m pretty sure that you don’t care, but I’m about three weeks overdue in writing this post. Instead of wasting time thinking up an intro line such as: “Here in the Department of Thinking About How to Defend Yourself From An Attacker Armed With A Banana…” or “Here in the the Department Of Never Knowing When It’s A Good Time To Switch Back To Summer Tires Because It’s Been Known To Snow Every Day Of The Year Here In Alberta…”, I’m just going to dive in.
I went with my daughter last week, to a pretty excellent toy store called Monkey Mountain, conveniently located in the town of Okotoks, Alberta. One of the other things that contribute to the general excellentness of Okotoks is the imaginatively-named Big Rock, a glacial erratic boulder sitting in a field west of Okotoks. The Big Rock is conveniently located near the foothills of the Canadian Rockies.
Big Rock, sitting in a field wishing that it had a cooler name but at the same time pretty stoked that it has such a great view of the Rocky Mountain foothills (in background)
But that’s not my point. My point is that my daughter and I both got a little giddy marveling at the vast cornucopia of toys in that store, including the usual suspects such as Lego, Playmobil, cat-sized shark oufits (after all, who doesn’t want to dress their cat in a shark outfit?), cont…
…Roombas (after all, who doesn’t want to plop their cat on a Roomba after it (the cat) has been clothed in a shark outfit?), cont…
Intrepid cat accompanied by its friend, Nestor
…miniature particle accelerator kits, dredging equipment, fiendishly-complex, dinky DIY dollhouse room kits and so forth.
Shark-themed cat outfits aside, it was the Calico Critters that really caught my eye and accordingly, I felt like I should bring alert readers up to speed. If you like fiendishly-dinky DIY dollhouse room kits you will love the Calico Critters.
Note that the Calico Critters is not a new type of infectious disease. Or a country music band.
The Department of Stringing Random Topics Together in One Post has its work cut out for it today because it has to weave the following topics into a coherent narrative: ways to screw up the making of a pot of drip coffee, alligator attacks, Hail Mary football plays, the world record for human female tongue circumference and last but not least, Mountain Chicken Frogs.
Before this gets underway, I have to point out that I shamelessly took this post’s feature image of the guy with the snazzy oven mitts from a blog called Rebecca Grace Quilting.
I hereby admit that I also shamelessly lifted a picture from that blog, of the author/accomplished seamstress, Rebecca Grace. Rebecca seems like a very friendly person if you ask me:
At this point you’re probably wondering, “Just what the heck kind of an opening paragraph is this, even?”
Alert readers of this blog know that here in the Department of Not Having Enough To Do, we concocted a large spreadsheet which codified the relatively unexplored universe of State Attributes aka State Symbols and tried to suss out what the Attributes might tell us about each State.
Based on what I and a friend of mine learned when we staggered around Eastern Idaho for a week this past Fall, we realized that we had to talk about the State Attribute situation in Idaho. We had absolutely no idea what was going on out there.
Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against Idaho. Napoleon Dynamite, the movie, was set in Idaho. Idaho and I were neighbors for three years when I lived in Ontario, Oregon, about a mile from the Snake River/Idaho border. I’ve done a lot of back country exploring/camping in Idaho. One of my sons will soon wed an Idahoan.
So basically, Idaho and I are on good terms. That said, when it comes to State Attributes, Idaho is a bit of a fixer-upper, in need of a bit of sprucing-up
A couple of weeks ago, my friend Bob started talking about the Seinfeld TV show which initially aired back in the early nineties. Eventually I had to ‘fess up and sheepishly disclose to him that I had only seen one episode of Seinfeld when it was current-the one in which Kramer decided to live in his shower.
When “Bob” regained consciousness, after passing out from sheer incredulity, he strongly opined that I absolutely had to watch all 169 episodes, as they were bordering on comedic genius. Not to mention running jokes.
Before I get going on The Doughnut Problem I need to backtrack a bit and comment on Attribute Creep, discussed in Part I. It seems to me that the general tendency toward adding more and more State Attributes is a 21st Century thing. I blame the Y2K scare.
My theory, which could be invalidated at any time in the face of new information, is this; people were so relieved that Society didn’t collapse on January 1, 2000 that they loosened their ties and got serious about commemorating stuff. Prior to this tie-loosening there was no point commemorating anything because a lot of people were pretty certain that we were all going to be catapulted back into the Stone Age.
Anyway, here we are almost 23 years later and things haven’t gone in the shitter. Yet. We should all remember the State Motto of South Carolina if we don’t already have it memorized: While I Breathe I Hope-Prepared in Mind and Resources.
All that aside, before we can talk about The Doughnut Problem we should probably discuss the State Dessert Problem in general and Massachusetts in particular. This requires another Venn diagram. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Well, here we are in Part II and as threatened, I’m going to discuss more Official State Attributes including, Buckminsterfullerenes (aka Buckyballs), Dessert, Fly-Fishing Flies, Glacial Erratics and Marsupials. Don’t be mislead into thinking that I’m going to start by taking a swing at Buckyballs though. Instead, I’m angling for a few laughs by starting with the Humuhumunukunukuapua`a, aka Triggerfish aka the Official State Fish of Hawaii. This fish really had to swim upstream to secure that perch.
Triggerfish still feeling a little sulky about the fact that it took so long to gain Official Hawaiian State Fish status
I was talking to my daughter one day recently and somehow we got on the topic of how each State in the United States has a bunch of officially-legislated State Symbols although a better moniker would probably be State Attributes. You know, things like the Official State Particle Accelerator, Official State STI, Official State Mustelid Including But Not Limited To The Weasel, The Stoat, The Fisher, The Marten, The Badger, The Polecat, The Wolverine And The Ferret.
Up here, north of the 49th parallel, each Province and Territory also has a handful of Symbols/Attributes but for the most part they’re pretty pedestrian: flowers, trees, fish, snow tires. That said, I noticed that a few more-sophisticated USA-type attributes have managed to inch their way into the portfolio of each Province or Territory. The technical name for this is Attribute Creep.
Somehow, the notion of all these Official Attributes waiting to be analyzed spoke to me and I wound up spending quite a few hours dissecting the Official USA State Symbols/Attributes site in considerable detail.
Maybe all this would have had something to do with my running out of OCD medication if I actually had OCD. But I don’t. Just saying.
Long story short, I wound up constructing an Excel sheet summarizing all 181 Official Primary Attributes spanning all the States in the USA. As luck would have it, about 60 of these Primary Attributes also had anywhere from one to 18 Sub-Attributes. This made for a grand total of 375 Attributes: give or take a few. That is a shit-ton of attributes if you ask me. But the USA is a pretty big country…
Years ago I read a three-volume set (of books) by John Nichols entitled the New Mexico Trilogy. The Trilogy wasn’t a real trilogy as there was no continuity between the books. Really, the only thing the three books had in common was that they were set in New Mexico.
The first book in the not-a-trilogy is The Milagro Beanfield War. It involved a skirmish/heated dispute between the townsfolk of Milagro and a real estate developer. Suffice it to say, if you liked Swamp Story and other Dave Barry books, you will probably like The Milagro Beanfield War. It’s full of zany, interesting characters and interlocking plot lines.
The reason the Beanfield War came to mind is that my son, Tyler aka Ty (not his real name), together with his partner Andrea (not her real name either), moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, earlier this year. (State Motto: We are too close to Texas.) The pseudonymous couple quickly noticed that they had an ant problem in the house. By the way, I think Taylor Swift wrote a song called Ant Problems. No, wait! That was Champagne Problems. My bad.
The Department of Lateral Thinking 
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