culture crusades
Add comment November 27th, 2007
Archive for November, 2007
true meaning of christmas
Add comment November 27th, 2007
Now I don’t want to be one of those curmudgeonly Grinches who want to steal the heart warming, made-for-TV sentimentality of the Christmas holidays, but……. Well….. SOMEBODY’S got to stand up and say enough is really quite enough. I mean when you got folks sittin 6-8 hours the same night as Thanksgiving, 25 degrees out and they’re pitching lawn chairs and tents outside Tyee Store so they can get first shot at the Black Friday specials, c’mon, digest your 5pounds of turkey, half ton of dressing, a bucket of mashed potatoes, a quarter bog of cranberry sauce and 3 slabs of pie with ice cream BEFORE moving into the next holiday.
Thanksgiving. That was the celebration where the Pilgrims offered the natives platinum cards, no annual fee, 2% frequent flyer miles, generous monthly minimum payments, wasn’t it??? Eat up, Chief, we’re all headed down to Plymouth Rock Mall tonight, be first in line at the Best Buy for their dawn opening, great sales on convection oven Franklin stoves before the Jamestown mob gets wind…..
The huddled masses parked outside the Tyee Store entrance, illuminated by the 75 watt yellow bug light, sure seemed festive, like maybe Don and Helen, the owners, were gonna be handing out free E-coli leftover rotisserie turkey dogs along with those Christmas specials. But you all know, like I did, the real meaning of Christmas is the camaraderie and the sharing of all those cheerful consumers waiting patiently for a real good deal. Oh, I know, they had a couple of altercations and some jostling at the door, and things did turn ominous when they discovered the specials were mostly in the outdated dairy department. But in the end nobody got more than their feelings hurt. Not enough to dampen the true spirit of the season/.
Christmas on the South End ……. It never really ends.
meteorology and how it relates to mating customs
Add comment November 16th, 2007
Down at my end of the island, the South End, we tell folks it rains 24/7 …. Times 365 days …. Hopin the only immigrants and refugees will be a few water skiers and maybe some scientists studying the flora and fauna of temperate rain forests. Truth is, it doesn’t rain much here. Oh, sure, it drizzles and mists and everything just this side of heavy dew, but we live in what the meteorologists, that’s a weatherman who still thinks meteors control atmospheric phenomena, call a Rain Shadow. I know, sounds like a bad radio show from the 40’s, but the South End, right after it was hit by asteroids, fell into it. Never the same again. Left a crater we call Puget Sound and after that the annual precipitation plummeted to under 25 inches a year. Science. A powerful tool.
25 inches isn’t a lot. I mean it’s not a desert, but frogs down here have to hurry past the tadpole stage and get right on to mating. Mating on the South End — and let’s be clear, I’m not venturing into the neighbors’ bedrooms –– I’m talking frogs. Polliwogs. Mating on the South End has to be PDQ. ASAP. They can’t wait for Viagara or amphibiagra. No sir, the pond’s drying up. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. Summer’s coming and the rains aren’t. Evolutionary frogs – if you swing that way – they’d probably forget the tadpole business and move into something a little drier. Your intelligent designer frogs would learn to pray for rain. Me, I’m a South Ender. I’m just glad I’m not a damn frog.
The point I’m desperately trying to make is this: us South Enders are natural born meteorologists. You got a well that goes dry when you run the washer and do the dishes and take a shower and wash the pick-up and sprinkle the garden, you KNOW the annual rainfall isn’t all that much. It’s an island. And the aquifer isn’t anything BUT that rainfall that drips from October to June off my clogged gutters. Maybe after the next meteor shower things’ll improve. For us and the toads. Until then, conserve. And mate fast …… the frogs, I mean.
