Diamonds Are A Girl's Worst Nightmare

I found out a little while back you can have your dearly departed's ashes compressed into a diamond. Seriously!

I got to wondering... If a guy's wife died, would he want to keep her around as a different sort of jewel than before? Then it hit me. What if he remarried? He could save money on an engagement ring and keep both wives! If he had the old one set into a new ring, that would be the old and new thing his new bride wore for the ceremony. "Yes, honey, that diamond is like a part of the family."

Of course, if she ever found out, he might end up with his former wife embedded in his forehead. This would give new meaning to the phrase, "always on my mind".

Or a Mom could give her former hubbie to her daughter at the point boys started noticing her. "Just remember, baby, your Daddy is always right there with you."

I am assuming, of course, that the raw material for each diamond is legally cremated. But if this technology fell into the wrong hands we could start seeing illegal diamond labs. Criminals, unhappy spouses, politicians, and parents who don't get their teenagers would love this. Pawn shops would be full of people who simply disappeared. You can't get DNA from a diamond.

Therefore I propose that the government turn this whole thing over to the same National Security Agency team responsible for disappearing the 100MPH carburetor. Soon the idea of turning Aunt Suzy into a diamond would be seen as just another conspiracy theory.

Aunt Suzy will sleep a lot better.

Don't Sit Under the Hippo Tree With Anyone Else But Me

I would love to publish this, but it's a kid's story, and I'm not sure anyone in their right mind would print it, at least before I'm a highly sought after author.

It was a beautiful spring day. The birds were blooming, the flowers were singing.

It was a great day to be in love.

Dave and Ginger went for a stroll in the fields and woods near the palace. They ended up, as always, in the great orchard.

Somehow, they always ended up under the hippo tree. Today was no different.

As Dave gazed down at Ginger, she looked up in return. Her eyes widened with joy. "Look!" she exclaimed, "The hippos are ripe!"

Indeed they were. They gazed fondly up at the hippos squirming amidst the leaves. Soon they would be falling, to prance off gaily in search of the nearby river.

Dave led Ginger to the base of the tree. He spread out his cloak and they sat down under an especially ripe hippo, the biggest they had ever seen. Tenderly he kissed her brow, then pulled out a small box. "For you."

Her face lit up with a smile; it put the sun to shame. As she opened it, a diamond glistened from a golden ring. "Will you marry me, Ginger?"

Ginger gasped. She looked deep into Dave's eyes and opened her mouth to reply.

The full, ripe hippo fell with a loud plop onto the lovers and their cloak.

ILLUSTRATOR'S NOTES
Ginger has the elegance and looks of Ginger from Gilligan's Island but her personality and demeanor are more like Mary Ann (but slightly less perky).
Dave is a tall, lean but muscular, dark haired cowboy who went to a university and started wearing polos.

 

Copyright 2013 Triple R Publishing, Round Rock, TX.

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I went back to this for some reason and started thinking about who I would want to cast in the movie version. (Yes, I realize it would be a very short movie-- even shorter than Hardware Wars, but at least it would be longer than Bambi vs Godzilla.)

Dave: Spencer Davis
Ginger: Joanie Anderson
Hippos: my nieces and nephews, with me in a cameo
Falling hippo: a piñata

If we were forced to use big names, I would be tempted to go with Brad and Angela, looking for the intensity they brought to Mr. and Mrs. Smith. I would use piñatas for the hippos, and Tim Conway as the falling hippo. My cameo would require my death as I would be the diamond in the ring.

Who would you cast? Would you have a cameo?

Life of Pie

(Inspired by Leigh Ballinger's constantly taunting me with pictures of pies.)

Pie's earliest memories were of extreme heat. Gradually he became aware of a red-orange glow. He grew and his skin toughened. Suddenly, the light changed. Cooler air washed over him. He shivered. Something fuzzy grabbed him and he flew through the air to land softly on a veritable ocean of wires. The great vessel in which he had lived was gone. He felt shipwrecked.

Pie was roused from sleep by noises. He was saved! A boy crept up from Pie's left. A tiger crept from his right. Surely one of these would help him, perhaps both!

The boy made a sound Pie didn't recognize, a snarl. The tiger replied with a louder version. The boy whipped out something bright and sharp and dangerous, a knife! The tiger unsheathed several dark and dangerous claws. Each moved closer, still snarling. Pie was confused; how would this help him get back into a nice, warm vessel to go home?

The boy, closer than the tiger, leaped suddenly, the knife descending. Sharp pain split Pie from one side to the other. By the time the tiger got to Pie, the boy had pulled half of him out of his metal exoskeleton. The tiger took the rest.

Rapidly finishing, the boy and the tiger licked their lips, grinned at one another, and fled the ship's kitchen before the baker returned.

THE END.

The Case of the Missing Balloon

On Valentine's Day each year for some time now, Sharon has snuck a gift into my office, or at my current job left it at the security desk. Last year was no different; she brought a giant, helium-filled frog that barely sat on the ground and hopped when I towed him, attached to a dozen, large, bright red, heart shaped balloons.

As usual, I put him up on my top shelf in my cube.

Meanwhile, our upper management, realizing that some people had been working long hours and forgotten to get their Significant Other anything for the holiday, brought in bunches of flowers, candy and cards for the miscreants to take home. Our CEO announced this in an email beginning, "In many ways I think it is the company's best interests to help our employees achieve a reasonably high level of domestic tranquility." The man has wisdom beyond his years.

Not having forgotten the holiday, I didn't need anything, which was a good thing, as the scene downstairs afterward was a wasteland; the marcomm group handling distribution looked stunned and a bit frightened.

Sitting at my desk the next morning, happily working away, our travel person (let's call her Carol) walked by. She smiled and said, "I took one of your balloons last night."

I laughed. "No, you didn't."

"Yes, I did!"

"Nonsense, there are still twelve..." I counted. Eleven. I counted again. "Oh, so you did. Why?"

"I wanted a little extra something for my husband. But you don't know how many balloons there are!"

"Of course I do. My wife sent me a dozen."

"She did not! You got those downstairs!"

"No, they didn't have balloons."

Consternation. "Are you serious?"

Steve popped his head over the cube wall. "They didn't have balloons. Those are from his wife."

"Oh, no! I thought you just grabbed a bunch of extras from downstairs!"

I teased her a bit, then realized she was really upset. I assured her it was no big deal. I thought it was funny. So, of course, did Sharon when I told her.

The next morning when I got to work, there were two really nice, red roses in a wine bottle. Carol had felt so bad she wanted to try to make it up to me! "I'd have brought it back, but I had written on it with a Sharpie[tm]." (She didn't say, "[tm]".)

She must have apologized a dozen times that day.

The frog is now flat, like roadkill. I released the rest of the balloons into the wild (either outside to disappear into the sky, or inside with their ribbons trimmed so they floated around about chest high). The roses withered and wandered off into a trash can.

The wine bottle sits on my desk. I still grin when I look at it.

Uncool

From the middle of sixth grade on, I was usually the uncool geek. Sometimes extremely so. If uncool geekiness had been an extreme sport, there are a lot of days I'd almost have won a gold medal. Why only almost? Because winning would have been at least a little bit cool.

I struggled to be cool-- at least when I wasn't lost in geeky things-- science, chess, comic books, reading, writing, and so on. I finally achieved coolness as a hippie during my college years. Then my world came crashing down. In the midst of despair at having totally made a wreck of things, I came face to face (literally) with God. He hadn't given up. He loved me as much as ever. I fell into Love's embrace.

I was promptly pronounced uncool by some of my friends. It felt surprisingly good. Over time, as I got comfy with who I am, and decided to not sweat it, and just love people, I found myself being treated as cool. Only I no longer cared. I didn't even know what to do with it. So I ignored it.

Just being able to not care if I'm cool is very cool.

You're cool? That's cool. Uncool? That's cool, too. Be you, and enjoy it. Love on folk. The ones who aren't all caught up in themselves and worried about being cool will come around.

Be cool. Whether you think you are or not. Be cool with being you. There's nobody more awesome than you.

Tumbleweeds on my Mind

Regardless of the temperature it's technically winter. All over the western plains of Texas, tumbleweeds have dried up, put their travelin' shoes on, and hitchhiked with the breeze. In high winds the weeds stampede en masse; they make lemmings look like severely introverted loners.

I grew up on the northeastern edge of El Paso with nothing over our back wall but desert. The winter winds inevitably headed west and invariably left an interlocked tumbleweed ramp many feet deep against the cinder block wall running the length of the neighborhood. The first calm weekend day, Dad and a bunch of other neighborhood men would drive to the end of the neighborhood, head into the desert behind the mass of weeds, park the cars a ways off, and spread out along the line of tumbleweeds.

After stuffing a newspaper or two into some of the weeds, each man would hold a lighter or match ready. On signal, each would light their section of tumbleweeds. A spouse or child would be in each back yard with a hose and shovel, just in case. The flames would leap 10-20 feet in the air; the whole conflagration lasted maybe a minute. Fast and furious, that's how they burn.

As a kid, it was exciting, always over much too fast. I suspect for the adults, it lasted a lot longer. Who wants to be party to setting the desert on fire and maybe burning half of El Paso? But of there was a problem, I never knew about it. Five minutes later, the fine ash was cool enough to walk through. After the first light breeze, it was gone, spread across the city too thinly to notice. But it's burned deeply into my mind.

Last month Sharon and I finally took our long overdue, first Vacation Out West together. A small tumbleweed named Dusty stuck a thumb out as we pulled over for a photo shoot, and Sharon brought him home. He seems content to just hang out, with no trace of the usual wanderlust. So far I've avoided mentioning fire around him. He seems sensitive.

Notice Dusty's color. He's a chameleon, blending into the desert to avoid predators-- mainly off-road pickup trucks and disgruntled homeowners with fire. It doesn't always work, which I suspect is why he's happy to be an indoor recluse. A brown recluse, but we are not afraid.

Thanks to Annie Hoffman Fentz for sharing the video and asking the questions that inspired this.

Faded Love Reignited (Music I Used to Love)

I hate it when I don't listen to one of my favorite bands for a while.

I love it when I don't listen to one of my favorite bands for a while and then start listening again.

I love it when I hear something I used to love, and I still love it.

I hate it when I hear something I used to love and now it just makes me cringe. "Really? I used to like that? No, I didn't. ARGH! I did! Bleah! Dog germs! I need antiseptic!" (Sorry, We just watched Charlie Brown the other night. Like good music, it's still both hysterical and poignant. I live for Snoopy kissing Lucy.)

So, here are a few songs or bands from my teens I listened to this past year for the first time in anywhere from a few years to thirty or more, and my reactions.

Red Rubber Ball The Cyrkle) - A brilliant pop song that spoke perfectly to a 14year old (it still got a lot of airplay a few years after it came out). Even though I hadn't really had a girlfriend since the 5th grade, I knew rejection. This carried me through the typical teenaged angst. I remember several glorious Sunday mornings on my paper route when this song was being played just as the sun came up. "Oh, I think it's gonna be alright. Yes, the worst is over now; the mornin' sun is shinin' like a red rubber ball..." And those jangly guitars! A big thumbs up,

Timothy (The Buoys) - I guess the basic pop structure of this song is pretty good, but the strings and horns are kind of heavy compared to the rock and roll instruments. The lyrics are pretty inane, and the thing sounds like it was recorded through a cheap, transistor radio. I suspect I mainly liked it for the sense of macabre. How many songs are about eating a friend to survive, and not even remembering it? "Bleah! Dog germs! I need antiseptic!"

The Grass Roots - Urgh. More inane lyrics, these aimed squarely at love struck teens. On the other hand, while the songs were somewhat typical pop, their rocky songs at least had an irresistible, driving beat, and some of the best horn arrangements and playing of the genre. Grill had some great bass riffs, too. Again, the recordings were geared toward cheap radios. I can enjoy some of their music; I just have to ignore the production and many of the lyrics (tough, but I manage).

The 1910 Fruitgum Company - I loved these guys. I had their 1, 2, 3, Red Light album. Only a couple of trusted girl friends (not girlfriends) knew I liked it; everyone else I knew would have spit on it (and me) if they'd known. Today, the closest thing to a redeeming feature of this album is "The Mighty Quinn". No, I take that back. Even this cover is painful to listen to (I just tried). What can I say? I was twelve. Hormones and insecurities will do this to you.

The Chicago Transit Authority (The Chicago Transit Authority( - Also known as CTA and Chicago, the first of many, self-titled albums by the Band Latterly Known As Chicago, was too progressive and short on love songs and simple songs about peace and love, and too instrumental for most people. This was the album that vindicated my choice of trombone, and made me realize how far I had to go in learning to play that as well as the guitar. While 99% of the world prefers their later albums, this, for me, is still THE Chicago album. The songs, the harmonies, the blend of traditional and experimental, the gripping horns, the searing lead guitar, they all grab me and drag me into the stereo today as vividly as they did in 1969. Four thumbs up- big toes count. (To this day, when anyone mentions "I'm a Man", it's the Chicago song that comes to mind.)

Black Sabbath - Their first four albums still blow me away. I can still listen to those straight through, back to back, over and over. Or just put one on repeat. There are several songs per album I could have sworn were Top 40 hits because I heard them so often. Most of them weren't, but they got a lot of airplay in Augusta, and a lot of stereo play at Martin O'Rourke's house and mine. They were one of the bands that defined the word "heavy" as it pertained to music. And if you ever get a chance to hear Paranoid in headphones while on laughing gas, do it! It's worth a root canal (if you have insurance).

Yes - I didn't hear their early albums for years, but bought Fragile and Close to the Edge on a whim when they came out on CD. How did I ever quit listening? Together with The Yes Album, I could while away a week with nothing else on the stereo (and have). "Starship Troopers" and "Roundabout" still make me want to get up and dance. "Cans and Brahms" still brings back the smells of dorms at Georgia Tech, the vivid reds and blues of Rich Sachleben's room. Far from "not a bad song in the bunch", there's not even a merely good song in the bunch. They're all great.

 

So, what music did you like years ago? What has held up and what hasn't? What did you listen to then that appalls you now?