Like these things so often do, the whole thing began with the words, “Watch this!” I think back on it now, (hindsight being what it is), and I honestly can’t remember ever uttering those words and having it end well. This time was no exception.
We’d just gotten the seven or so inches of snow that made every kid in the area crazy with “School’s Out Syndrome”, and a fresh layer of awe-inspiring powder covered the small hill in my front yard that would make even an Olympic snowboarder smile. My kids spent the morning staring from the windows, just waiting for “Daddy” to get done with some business stuff so that I could take them out for some sled-riding fun. Truth be told, I was looking forward to it as much as they. Some of us never grow up, after all.
The first to hit the “Widow-Maker”, (more of a dwarfed-down version of a bunny slope, but we’ll get to my pet-name in a minute), was my son. Our weapons of choice for this attack on the fresh powder were the round, plastic “saucers” that have been the source of so many hospital visits in the past. Nothing is too good for my kids.
As he sat upon the saucer and pushed off the edge of the slope, the yet-unpacked snow shoveled against the front lip of the disk and his protruding snow boots dug into the snow in front of him creating a set of unintended brakes, constantly applied. I took one look at his disappointed face and knew that I had some work to do.
“Don’t worry, son,” I said. “It just takes some packing down. Here, let Daddy take a couple of runs on it and I’ll get a good groove packed in … then you’ll fly!”
“Are we gonna’ build a jump again this year?” He asked, a smile on his face spreading all the way to the edges of his parka hood. I instantly remembered the crying, the swelling, the getting yelled at by my wife the previous year – (all related to my having built him a “snow-jump”) – and answered in the best way I could … “We’ll see,” I said. Truth be told, I really wanted to. Watching him soar through the air last year was a blast … until the “incident”, that is.
I pushed myself on the saucer, working my way down the hill. After two runs, the snow was cleanly packed and I could tell by the nearly six-inch-deep groove that my kids were going to reach a speed of around Mach-26 when their little behinds got on the saucers. I was excited. I got back to the top of the hill and helped my son get situated for his inaugural descent.
I pushed him off – ever so lightly, since it was the first run – and he made it several yards before his feet dug in and abruptly stopped him. Instantly I realized that I was going to have to teach him a better technique. As he worked his way back to the crest of the tiny hill, I began to sit down upon the second saucer and, folding my legs in front of me “Indian-style”, I said the magic words … “No – you gotta’ sit ‘Indian-style’ … here … ‘WATCH THIS’!”
I shoved with my gloved hands like an Olympic gold medalist leaving the gate, the ground barely creating friction beneath my too-heavily-weighted plastic saucer. Instantly I lurched forward and felt gravity take hold, pulling me down toward the steepest part of the hill and on to an award-winning run never before matched by mortal man. It was an awesome thrill that is hard to put into words. It was like flying … like being shot from a cannon … and, it lasted about ten-feet. Suddenly, something at the right front side of the saucer dug itself into something immoveable – perhaps a frozen piece of dog-dropping, perhaps a protruding stump - I’m really not sure. Regardless, my saucer spun around backward – my view now adjusted to include the faces of my laughing wife and children at the top of the hill – and as to where I was headed, I had no idea.
Things may have been okay at that point. Perhaps, had the next thing not happened, I would have safely descended to the bottom, slowed to a manageable speed and ultimately gotten up without injury. As it was, however, somehow I lost balance and leaned back, the sudden shift in weight digging the lip of the saucer into the snow and tossing me over like a drunken gymnast. I felt myself going over – all six-foot, seven-inches and 250-pounds of me – somehow managing a somewhat graceful somersault. This too, would have been fine, had I made it back to my feet and bounced to a solid landing. My family would likely have held up 10-point score cards, judging such a wonderful display of ability.
Unfortunately, at the apex of the somersault – just when all of my weight was forcing my neck into the ground – a loud “cracking sound” filled the air. Not just a cracking sound like the popping of a finger or a joint that you hear within your own body – this one was loud. Parts of Franklin, Crawford, Washington and Gasconade counties reported hearing the snap and I’ve heard rumor that a seismograph at the University of Missouri – Columbia actually registered some movement. Twenty-years ago, I would have bounced up from such an incident and moved on to the next thing. This year, however, I just sort of lay there for a minute – assessing the damages mentally and wondering if death would be preferable to the pain I was about to feel.
It’s been a couple of weeks now, since which time I’ve had a trip to the Urgent Care doctor who awarded me with news of a broken T7 vertebra. I’ve been to another doctor who sent me to a specialist by way of the pharmacy. The specialist has now also granted me bulging disks in T3 and T4. What a guy. And finally, I’ve just today been shot with some sort of pain killer directly into several locations of my spine – a sensation that I wouldn’t recommend while it’s happening, but now that it’s done, I could swear my back is no longer broken. In fact, right now I feel as though I could do a back flip from this chair and land perfectly on my feet! In fact …
“WATCH THIS …”
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Monday, February 23, 2009
WDL's "Best of the Journal, 2008" NOW AVAILABLE!
Columnist William Douglas Little's "Best of the Journal, 2008" is now available in both print and as an e-Book Download! "Best of the Journal, 2008" includes all of Little's weekly columns from the Sullivan Journal since it's inception! Every column, as it was originally published in the paper - all the laughs, all the misfortune and all the fun! Did you miss a week? Forget one of your favorite tales? Have a friend out of the area with whom you'd like to share Little's column? THIS IS THE PERFECT OPPORTUNITY!
Plus, for those who do not reside in our wonderful community of Sullivan, Missouri - this collection includes a forward entitled "Lessons in Ruralities", which will bring the reader up to speed on the hot-topic issues of Sullivan, Missouri that are addressed within Little's columns.
A must have for any fan of Little's column, (or his book, for that matter), visit Little's website http://www.williamdouglaslittle.com and order a print version or download the e-Book version today! (Print versions are available for immediate shipment and will be in-stores locally beginning March 16th! e-Book version is available for immediate download RIGHT NOW!)
Monday, February 16, 2009
Back to the Pigs and Berries
The world used to be a simple place. Nothing complicated, nothing confusing. People thought about two things: survival and reproduction. (Not always in that order). You see ... we weren’t all that different from the “wild animals” that inhabit our woods today. We hunted and gathered and bred. That was it. No stomach problems, no stocks to crash, no slow business to concern ourselves with, no meetings or quarterly reports to prepare for. Life was what life was intended to be. Life.
In a simple sort of way, life was still like a business … you still had to plan. Let’s say that you’re a “primitive” person living in a cave somewhere. In this cave, you’ve got your little family: a couple of greasy-haired, dirty-knee children running around in coyote skins and some beautiful wife with dirt streaks on her forehead and bad teeth. Life is good and, as the “man of the cave”, you’ve got a responsibility, (though you don’t have a language so you don’t think about it … you just sort of grunt thoughts through your mind). The grunts, however, come together to remind you of the things that you have to do – you have to get food … everyday.
As complex creatures, we likely started out by budgeting. If you stumbled upon a particularly large berry patch on a Tuesday, you likely would have filled whatever pack or skid you had and brought home enough berries to last your family for several days. If you were lucky – and the berries weren’t poisonous – you had enough to feed your family through Saturday. Knowing that, you had no worries for the next several days. You sat in your cave, eating berries with juice staining your beard from sun-up to sundown until maybe Thursday. Then you went out hunting again.
Things really got exciting when you were lucky enough to catch something alive and bring it back to the cave, like a pig, for instance. Once you had the live pig, you had a safety net – a little nest egg to call on if times got tough. This nest egg eased the burden of life and allowed you to hunt and gather more at ease. Much like a salesman today, you sell more with money in your pocket because desperation does not show through. The pig, while not in your pocket, allowed you to hunt more freely and pay attention to the details of sneaking up on things and follow the steps that make you hunt more effectively.
Somewhere along the line, capitalism also worked its way into society. Say, for example, you’ve got a stockpile of nuts, berries, pterodactyl eggs on ice and your pet pig. The guy in the next cave, however, has none of these things, but he’s got two piglets – a male and a female. Well, knowing that you’ve got enough to eat for a while, and that he’s starving, you quickly figure out that you can take advantage of that situation to profit. If you had the piglets, you could eat your other stuff until they were old enough to breed, which would make you more pigs – even less worry for the future. Your neighbor Ugh, however, is starving. He’s considering how much meat might actually be on those piglets. So, one day you go to Ugh’s cave and offer to trade your full-grown pig for his two piglets. Ugh takes the deal, you become a long-term investor for a return and Ugh’s family begins eating your pet pig right away. Everyone is happy, (well, except maybe your original pig).
Now, some tens-of-thousands of years later, we seem to have progressed quite far, indeed. Instead of being able to catch and keep a pig – to trade it for future pigs (plural), and feed your family, we’ve decided to form a government to handle things for us. Each year, the government takes nearly half of the nuts and berries that we collect, they take half of our pigs, and in turn, they give it to Ugh and his family so that they don’t have to trade their piglets, but still get to eat. In fact, they give so much to Ugh, that they are no longer even giving real pigs. They’re giving pretend pigs – borrowed from the Chinese and the middle-eastern countries, which in-turn, want nothing more than to come and take all of our pigs and kick us out of our caves. Somehow, our government figures that they’ll eventually pay back the Chinese and the Middle-Easterners by collecting enough nuts and berries and future pigs from us, and yet we’ll still have enough to eat. The problem is, we don’t manufacture pigs here anymore. We buy all of our pigs and berries from the Chinese and the Middle-Easterners. Which I guess means, that we’ll have to buy the pigs from them with money borrowed from them in order to pay them back for the pigs and berries that we borrowed. Am I missing something here?
Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to encourage our own people to start manufacturing our own pigs and berries – thus creating jobs so that Ugh could afford to supply his own family with pigs and berries from market, thereby providing money to the marketer to supply his family with pigs and berries and still buy more pigs and berries to sell to others? Then, we could pay back the pigs and berries debt owed to the Chinese and the Middle East, without going further into debt.
Of course, it doesn’t seem that we’re real interested in doing that, yet. Instead, we want to build new bridges over which to haul the borrowed pigs and berries, to build new tennis courts and water slides upon which we can occupy our time doing anything other than produce pigs and berries – AND we want to pay pig farmers not to farm pigs; berry farmers not to farm berries and give money to the big cave lenders so that they can afford to kick us all out of our caves.
Personally, I think we were better off with the hunt/gather/pig thing. At least we had less stress back then. (I’m sure the pigs would disagree). However, since we’re obviously not going to go back to the days of old, I think that we should consider evening up the bill with China and the Middle East right away. Pay them off and start fresh. How? Give them California, (all of it – except Disney Land, however). Look, half of the bad ideas in government management come out of that State, (they’ve been on the verge of bankruptcy for the past 9,000-years, it seems), and besides, if we keep Disney Land, the price of admission alone would pay for enough pigs and berries to feed the remaining 49-States for at least another 38,000 generations.
In a simple sort of way, life was still like a business … you still had to plan. Let’s say that you’re a “primitive” person living in a cave somewhere. In this cave, you’ve got your little family: a couple of greasy-haired, dirty-knee children running around in coyote skins and some beautiful wife with dirt streaks on her forehead and bad teeth. Life is good and, as the “man of the cave”, you’ve got a responsibility, (though you don’t have a language so you don’t think about it … you just sort of grunt thoughts through your mind). The grunts, however, come together to remind you of the things that you have to do – you have to get food … everyday.
As complex creatures, we likely started out by budgeting. If you stumbled upon a particularly large berry patch on a Tuesday, you likely would have filled whatever pack or skid you had and brought home enough berries to last your family for several days. If you were lucky – and the berries weren’t poisonous – you had enough to feed your family through Saturday. Knowing that, you had no worries for the next several days. You sat in your cave, eating berries with juice staining your beard from sun-up to sundown until maybe Thursday. Then you went out hunting again.
Things really got exciting when you were lucky enough to catch something alive and bring it back to the cave, like a pig, for instance. Once you had the live pig, you had a safety net – a little nest egg to call on if times got tough. This nest egg eased the burden of life and allowed you to hunt and gather more at ease. Much like a salesman today, you sell more with money in your pocket because desperation does not show through. The pig, while not in your pocket, allowed you to hunt more freely and pay attention to the details of sneaking up on things and follow the steps that make you hunt more effectively.
Somewhere along the line, capitalism also worked its way into society. Say, for example, you’ve got a stockpile of nuts, berries, pterodactyl eggs on ice and your pet pig. The guy in the next cave, however, has none of these things, but he’s got two piglets – a male and a female. Well, knowing that you’ve got enough to eat for a while, and that he’s starving, you quickly figure out that you can take advantage of that situation to profit. If you had the piglets, you could eat your other stuff until they were old enough to breed, which would make you more pigs – even less worry for the future. Your neighbor Ugh, however, is starving. He’s considering how much meat might actually be on those piglets. So, one day you go to Ugh’s cave and offer to trade your full-grown pig for his two piglets. Ugh takes the deal, you become a long-term investor for a return and Ugh’s family begins eating your pet pig right away. Everyone is happy, (well, except maybe your original pig).
Now, some tens-of-thousands of years later, we seem to have progressed quite far, indeed. Instead of being able to catch and keep a pig – to trade it for future pigs (plural), and feed your family, we’ve decided to form a government to handle things for us. Each year, the government takes nearly half of the nuts and berries that we collect, they take half of our pigs, and in turn, they give it to Ugh and his family so that they don’t have to trade their piglets, but still get to eat. In fact, they give so much to Ugh, that they are no longer even giving real pigs. They’re giving pretend pigs – borrowed from the Chinese and the middle-eastern countries, which in-turn, want nothing more than to come and take all of our pigs and kick us out of our caves. Somehow, our government figures that they’ll eventually pay back the Chinese and the Middle-Easterners by collecting enough nuts and berries and future pigs from us, and yet we’ll still have enough to eat. The problem is, we don’t manufacture pigs here anymore. We buy all of our pigs and berries from the Chinese and the Middle-Easterners. Which I guess means, that we’ll have to buy the pigs from them with money borrowed from them in order to pay them back for the pigs and berries that we borrowed. Am I missing something here?
Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to encourage our own people to start manufacturing our own pigs and berries – thus creating jobs so that Ugh could afford to supply his own family with pigs and berries from market, thereby providing money to the marketer to supply his family with pigs and berries and still buy more pigs and berries to sell to others? Then, we could pay back the pigs and berries debt owed to the Chinese and the Middle East, without going further into debt.
Of course, it doesn’t seem that we’re real interested in doing that, yet. Instead, we want to build new bridges over which to haul the borrowed pigs and berries, to build new tennis courts and water slides upon which we can occupy our time doing anything other than produce pigs and berries – AND we want to pay pig farmers not to farm pigs; berry farmers not to farm berries and give money to the big cave lenders so that they can afford to kick us all out of our caves.
Personally, I think we were better off with the hunt/gather/pig thing. At least we had less stress back then. (I’m sure the pigs would disagree). However, since we’re obviously not going to go back to the days of old, I think that we should consider evening up the bill with China and the Middle East right away. Pay them off and start fresh. How? Give them California, (all of it – except Disney Land, however). Look, half of the bad ideas in government management come out of that State, (they’ve been on the verge of bankruptcy for the past 9,000-years, it seems), and besides, if we keep Disney Land, the price of admission alone would pay for enough pigs and berries to feed the remaining 49-States for at least another 38,000 generations.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Bad Words
I guess because I now write for a living, (whereas several years ago, I did not), I’m more in tune to the goofiness of our language than I used to be. In fact, I guess I can somewhat understand why immigrants to this great country of ours aren’t always eager to learn English. Of course, there was a time when learning the language was a requirement – apparently those days are long-gone. But, for those who want to become productive citizens and communicate among us – well, they’ve got their work cut out for them.
The biggest thing with the English language is, there seems to be no common sense involved. It’s like the same people who design roadwork detours were also in charge of coming up with the words we use – must’ve been their ancestors. Plurals, for example, have no consistency whatsoever. Take the word “Mouse”. If you have more than one mouse, you get mice. Why then, if you own more than one “house” do you not have “hice”? You don’t. You have “houses”. A goose is a nice bird. Find a flock of them and you’ll see “geese”. A herd of “moose”, however, is not meese, but moose. Like “fish”, the plural of moose is moose. (If you’re a fan of the Godfather movies, you may accept “swimming with the fishes”, but for the rest of us, it’s still fish). Why, then, does a genie grant you three “wishes” when you rub his lamp? Wouldn’t it make more sense if he granted you three wish?
Numbers are another problem. Who ever decided that we’d have something totally out of whack between ten and twenty? 21 is pronounced “twenty-one”. A direct conversion of the words “two” and “ten” … “TW-EN-ty” Thirty is the same way, as is forty, (which should be spelled “fourty”), and so-on. So why the word “eleven” instead of onety-one? Twelve is really messed up as it specifies that the “two” should come first, followed apparently by an elf. Who thought that up? Shouldn’t it be “onety-two”? When you get to 100, you pronounce it “one-hundred”, not “eleventy-zero”. Somebody was really drunk when they came up with this stuff.
Another obvious error is the apparent laziness – or lack of creativity – of whomever was in charge of coming up with the Queen’s English. We have entirely too many words that are spelled the exact same, but mean totally different things. You really have to look at the word within it’s intended context to guess which version the writer is implying – which can be quite confusing. “Lead”, for example, can be a metal taken from the ground and used in the standard #2 pencil, among other things. Probably causes cancer, too. (What doesn’t). However, if you’re in front of other people, you are in the “lead”. Hmm. So, let’s use the same word for being the fastest as the word for a heavy, inanimate object. Makes good sense there. Why not use the word “leed”? You have a “head” on your shoulders, but you “heed” someone’s warning. Pronunciation is the same – spelling is different. They went to the trouble of spelling “whale” with a silent “h”, but made an annoying cry a wail. No confusion there. “Weather” is outside, but “whether” you spell it right is up to you. And, speaking of weather, (not whether), why are meteorologists weathermen and not weatherologists? Do meteors affect our weather? What do you call a guy who studies meteors? Not a meteorologist, and considering they could be asteroids, you can’t have that because an astrologist studies stars. What’s a starologist do? Maybe they’re the ones selling maps on Hollywood street corners?
Some words are also spelled the same, but mean different things based on whether they are nouns, verbs, pronouns or adjectives. The aforementioned “goose”, as a noun, is a bird. “Goose” as a verb, however, is a real pain in the … well, you know. And whoever thought to “duck” to avoid something? I’ve never seen a “duck” “duck”. They fly, they swim, they flip upside down in the water, which is kind of a “duck ducking”, I suppose, but still – couldn’t we have called it something more descriptive. Like “bend down?” And what does it “mean” if someone is “mean”? Are they “mean” as in yell at everyone, climb the water-tower with a rifle “mean”, or do they have a sense of meaning, therefore making them a “mean” person? Compound that with “time” and you get “meantime”, which basically is the interim time between two events – now and later. What the heck does that mean? Meanwhile, everyone is confused.
Of course, one could ponder for hours why baby cows are calves but baby crows are not cralves. Or why a “crow” is pronounced “oh” instead of “ow” in the first place. We could wonder why “heart” is pronounced like “cart” instead of “hear”. Why when you “die”, you’ve “died”, yet when you “fly”, you’ve “flown”, (or flew – not to be confused with flu, which could be an ailment or part of your chimney, but is spelled differently than “shoe”). Had we the time and space, I’d also ask you why a nail-gun shoots nails, a staple-gun shoots staples, a shotgun (not hyphenated) shoots shot, but a gun is a gun, not a bullet-gun. And perhaps we’d get into the drive on the parkway and park on the driveway thing, as well. That’s always been a popular discussion.
Fortunately, however, we’ve got to end this column here since we’re out of space, (as in “room”, not “space” as in the final frontier … which should be spelled “frontear”, except then people might pronounce it “frontare” like ripping paper rather than “fronteer” like crying). Well, I think you get my point, (as in my meaning, not “pointing” at something … and not the sharp edge of a pencil).
The biggest thing with the English language is, there seems to be no common sense involved. It’s like the same people who design roadwork detours were also in charge of coming up with the words we use – must’ve been their ancestors. Plurals, for example, have no consistency whatsoever. Take the word “Mouse”. If you have more than one mouse, you get mice. Why then, if you own more than one “house” do you not have “hice”? You don’t. You have “houses”. A goose is a nice bird. Find a flock of them and you’ll see “geese”. A herd of “moose”, however, is not meese, but moose. Like “fish”, the plural of moose is moose. (If you’re a fan of the Godfather movies, you may accept “swimming with the fishes”, but for the rest of us, it’s still fish). Why, then, does a genie grant you three “wishes” when you rub his lamp? Wouldn’t it make more sense if he granted you three wish?
Numbers are another problem. Who ever decided that we’d have something totally out of whack between ten and twenty? 21 is pronounced “twenty-one”. A direct conversion of the words “two” and “ten” … “TW-EN-ty” Thirty is the same way, as is forty, (which should be spelled “fourty”), and so-on. So why the word “eleven” instead of onety-one? Twelve is really messed up as it specifies that the “two” should come first, followed apparently by an elf. Who thought that up? Shouldn’t it be “onety-two”? When you get to 100, you pronounce it “one-hundred”, not “eleventy-zero”. Somebody was really drunk when they came up with this stuff.
Another obvious error is the apparent laziness – or lack of creativity – of whomever was in charge of coming up with the Queen’s English. We have entirely too many words that are spelled the exact same, but mean totally different things. You really have to look at the word within it’s intended context to guess which version the writer is implying – which can be quite confusing. “Lead”, for example, can be a metal taken from the ground and used in the standard #2 pencil, among other things. Probably causes cancer, too. (What doesn’t). However, if you’re in front of other people, you are in the “lead”. Hmm. So, let’s use the same word for being the fastest as the word for a heavy, inanimate object. Makes good sense there. Why not use the word “leed”? You have a “head” on your shoulders, but you “heed” someone’s warning. Pronunciation is the same – spelling is different. They went to the trouble of spelling “whale” with a silent “h”, but made an annoying cry a wail. No confusion there. “Weather” is outside, but “whether” you spell it right is up to you. And, speaking of weather, (not whether), why are meteorologists weathermen and not weatherologists? Do meteors affect our weather? What do you call a guy who studies meteors? Not a meteorologist, and considering they could be asteroids, you can’t have that because an astrologist studies stars. What’s a starologist do? Maybe they’re the ones selling maps on Hollywood street corners?
Some words are also spelled the same, but mean different things based on whether they are nouns, verbs, pronouns or adjectives. The aforementioned “goose”, as a noun, is a bird. “Goose” as a verb, however, is a real pain in the … well, you know. And whoever thought to “duck” to avoid something? I’ve never seen a “duck” “duck”. They fly, they swim, they flip upside down in the water, which is kind of a “duck ducking”, I suppose, but still – couldn’t we have called it something more descriptive. Like “bend down?” And what does it “mean” if someone is “mean”? Are they “mean” as in yell at everyone, climb the water-tower with a rifle “mean”, or do they have a sense of meaning, therefore making them a “mean” person? Compound that with “time” and you get “meantime”, which basically is the interim time between two events – now and later. What the heck does that mean? Meanwhile, everyone is confused.
Of course, one could ponder for hours why baby cows are calves but baby crows are not cralves. Or why a “crow” is pronounced “oh” instead of “ow” in the first place. We could wonder why “heart” is pronounced like “cart” instead of “hear”. Why when you “die”, you’ve “died”, yet when you “fly”, you’ve “flown”, (or flew – not to be confused with flu, which could be an ailment or part of your chimney, but is spelled differently than “shoe”). Had we the time and space, I’d also ask you why a nail-gun shoots nails, a staple-gun shoots staples, a shotgun (not hyphenated) shoots shot, but a gun is a gun, not a bullet-gun. And perhaps we’d get into the drive on the parkway and park on the driveway thing, as well. That’s always been a popular discussion.
Fortunately, however, we’ve got to end this column here since we’re out of space, (as in “room”, not “space” as in the final frontier … which should be spelled “frontear”, except then people might pronounce it “frontare” like ripping paper rather than “fronteer” like crying). Well, I think you get my point, (as in my meaning, not “pointing” at something … and not the sharp edge of a pencil).
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)
