This morning I was fulfilling my duties as the Director of the Arbour Lake Department of Bernese Mountain Dogs, minding my own business and taking my Berner, Sarge, for an emptying, when I encountered someone who had a container hanging on a strap around their neck. The container featured air vents and a clear plastic half-dome windshield. I thought it might have been a re-entry pod or something space-related. From a distance I could see a passenger moving inside and I thought maybe it was a ferret or possibly a stoat. Turns out it was neither.
OK. Just to be clear, the man on the left in the Featured Image is not a farmer and the other guy is not a farmer either. For some reason I thought the guy on the right might be a Park Ranger, like from Yosemite or maybe Yellowstone. I also thought he might be a cowboy because it looked like he was wearing leather chaps. In fact, I toyed with the notion that he might even be a Texas Ranger but his hat didn’t cut it.
The two guys in the Featured Image are actually whale fishermen. You probably figured that out already. And in addition, you probably also figured out that the thing they’re holding is not one of the whale’s flippers.
That revelation should cause this question to spring to mind: why the dickens (no pun intended) did a photo of two men holding a whale penis get inserted (no pun intended) into this post?
I was sitting around a few days ago, chewing the fat with a buddy of mine, whom I’ll call Tim (not his real name), and the topic of weather came up. This inevitably led to a post that I wrote years ago, even before the Emedics days.
Here in The Department of Lateral Thinking we (well me, mostly) think laterally about a lot of stuff including Materials Science. For those of you who don’t know, Materials Science is the study of materials, and this includes materials like Oobleck.
Geisel T, Bartholomew and the Oobleck. Random House 1949
Anyone who has ever been a child whose parents read Dr. Suess books (and also read them to their kids) knows that Oobleck was the tenacious green goo that fell out of the sky after bored King Derwin commissioned his magicians to conjure up a new kind of weather:
Don’t try this at home
A young lad named Bartholomew played a key role in the narrative as he finally had to go back to the magicians to undo their spell. Things were getting too sticky.
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.
The Department of Lateral Thinking 
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