The Hick Test

Thor: With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy, how do you tell if you're in the company of a hick? I've met men with junky yards or bad dental hygene or closets full of flannel who have turned out to have masters degrees in history, or are virtuousi of some brand, or were POW's (I even have an aquaintance who escaped from the Nazis 4 times. Google "Harvey Gann". He later became a "notorious" chief narc officer in Austin. It really is worth looking him up and reading about his, often humourous, exploits.) I don't know how many times I've begun by speaking slowly with small words, only to find out that my listener knows many large words in many different languages.

To develop a hick test, we need a better definition of "hick". I don't think interesting people are hicks. So no matter how many shelled-out vehicles one owns or how toothless one's wife is, he can escape hickdom by the simple, yet ellusive, quality of having some interesting thoughts. Assuming one's brain is in working condition, it's not really all that hard to read a book with the TV off, or vacation somewhere besides Six Flags. I love historical, well-researched novels, by the likes of Leon Uris or Herman Wouk. If one knows a bit about Irish history or something about the strategies used in the Pacific Theatre, then one is interesting, and therefore not a hick by my definition.

I think the only viable hick test is conversation. I bring this up because I'm going to a family reunion this weekend, and the first thing I think in these circumstances is "What a bunch of hicks." The second thing I think is "I hope I have enough booze to make the inane conversations bearable." Our family is based in that part of the country which, on the population density map, is labeled "0-2". That is, we average between zero and two people per square mile. If you're from such an area, you understand. If not, let me point out that not only do you know everyone in your town, but you know everyone within a 50-mile radius.

Here's the "hick" part. At my family reunion, almost all discussion will be aimless meanderings around the collective family trees. "Fat Burns got married? To who[sic]?" "He married one of the Stretch twins. The one with the mole." "Really? I thought she was his second cousin." "Naw, you might be thinking of Fats Yokum. He was a shirt-tail relation of the Stretches." "How?" "Well, Fats's mom was a Bernard and ol' Hoot Bernard married into the Luellen's. Mary Jo Luellen was grandma to the Stretch twins." "OK, I guess I knew that. But who did the other twin marry?" And on and on and on and on..... I'm getting a headache in advance.

This is the Hick Test: Strike up a conversation and see how long it takes before you've climbed the family tree all the way back to the first Neanderthal. (Which is not all that far back in my family.) My assertion here is that anyone who finds such discussion un-boring can't have anything interesting in floating around in his head, otherwise he'd be talking about that.

Hopefully a good fist fight will break out early this weekend and break the ennui.

Tyr: By your definition, all junior high kids are hicks. (A classification I'm quite comfortable with.) I'd bet a month's pay that every conversation amongst young teens is nothing but a report about some previous conversation. "I told him I wouldn't put up with that, then he said I shouldn't be so picky and then I said it wasn't any of his business and he said he'd make it his business but I told him his nose was too long, if you know what I mean..." It can be hell trying to read on the bus when a gaggle of junior high kids invades. The most interesting thing in their lives is chatter. And chatter breeds chatter.

I'm sure not looking forward to the weekend. But we'll probably get a card game going and we can fleece the herd a bit. The downside to cards in our family (we play 5-point Pitch) is that after every hand, we have to analyze and re-analyze the play. "You should have led your Jack so I could save my 10, then my trump would have taken the points on the last trick...." This sort of discussion should also be hick-indicating. The sentence "Shut up and deal" has no effect. At least there's alcohol. We homebrew, so we'll be taking a keg. I hope we can have it by the pool.

Speaking of "Six Flags", here's a Texas trivia question: It's called "Six Flags" because there have been 6 sovereign flags over Texas. What were they?

The purpose of these family reunions seems to be so that the old people can bring out their pictures and the family tree charts and start in on the hick conversations. None of us younger folks like it a bit, but, like lemmings, we return every couple years and live through it. We've got 18 first cousins on that side of the family, most of them have spouses, so there's about 30 people in our generation. Only 3 of them can read books without pictures. The rest spend their time either breeding or using dope to further degrade their chromosomes in preparation for breeding.

In summary: It's time to practice our fake smiles.

Tyr and Thor

A Big Rock is not a Saw

Thor: The year is 1973 and I'm a preteen boy who likes dirt and forts and rickety bike ramps. My two best friends and I discovered a large pit at the end of a corn field. (It was an unused irrigation reclamation pond.) What bliss! We could ride our bikes around the inside slope (and we soon had a track pounded into the dirt.) We dug holes here and there, shot arrows at critters, and, as is inevitable, conceived a large permanent structure to serve as our impenetrable fortress. The nearby junk pile was a source of some weathered planks and refridgerator doors and wire (pretty much everything you need for a good fort.)

We didn't have any tools, but we managed to dig a 10 by 10 foot hole about a foot deep using short boards. We dragged wall material over and began construction. One board was unusable because it was about twice too long for our purposes. I came up with the clever idea of laying the board over an old hole of ours. (About 2 feet in diameter, I think we made this hole as a test pit for one of our many attempts at making gun powder.) So the middle of this board is spanning the hole, and my idea is to get the biggest rock I can carry and drop it on the middle of the board. I'll guess the rock weighed about 50 pounds.

OK, the idea worked. The board snapped nicely in the middle, so I don't really understand why my two ex-friends needed to fall over laughing and gasping for breath. They didn't think of any clever ideas and my clever idea worked as predicted. The tiny, little, insignificant flaw in my plan is that my head was directly above the hole when I let go of the rock. The far ends of the board shot up and smacked me me both temples. Nothing will ruin a good friendship like someone laughing their ass off while you're experiencing incredible pain.

The fort was never finished, and I don't know what happened to our Playboy stash.

Tyr: Too bad camcorders hadn't been invented yet. Then your buddies would have won 10 grand on AFV. At this point in our culture, martial arts was starting to trickle into our consciousness. David Carridine had his Kung Fu show on, and we'd all watched Batman and Robin doing some moves that looked vaguely karate-like. We knew that the double slap to the temples was a common and deadly karate move.

I doubt, however, that any of us had ever seen someone do it to himself.

Every little town has its "dirty family". Usually they have lots of kids, and they use their bathtub only for storing dirty clothes. Steve was the family member in our class. His older sister got a new pair of 70's flower print denim bell-bottoms and wore them for two weeks, so that they were noticably dirty. Then Steve wore them, unwased, for at least two weeks after that. It was amusing that he thought his hippy pants made him look cool.

In 7th grade a new kid named Danny moved to town. He was pretty obnoxious, even for a new kid. He tried to bully all of us and he pretended that he used drugs and that he was some kind of bad boy. We weren't fooled. We just ignored him. As he worked his way down the pecking order trying to find someone he could impress, he eventually got down to the very bottom: Steve. Heh. Not even Steve was that stupid or that desparate for a friend.

Danny, realizing that Steve was his last chance to recruit a groupie, pressed his non-advantage, until Steve got angry. The verbal battle ended with the agreement that the two of them would meet behind the school at 3 p.m. We turned out to watch, of course. Danny peeled off his shirt and took off his socks and shoes. Steve just stood there. Danny warmed up with some showy karate-like stretches and kicks. Steve just stood there. Finally Danny was ready and closed with his foe. His first move was a sort of flying side kick to Steve's face. As his foot was in the air, Steve, with his hands still in his pockets, kicked him square in the groin. End of fight.

Every kid, regardless of hygene, should get to be a hero for a day. A couple years later, Danny's sisters tried their best to become sluts, but couldn't get any takers. The family eventually moved away, but no one really noticed.

In summary: The chief value in the marial arts has been as a source of humor. Hooray for Jackie Chan.

Tyr and Thor

Two Conversations

Thor: Last year, my wife took me to one of those house-turned-into-eatery restaurants for lunch. One usually doesn't think of lunch as intimate, but we were seated at one of three tables in an ex-bedroom. Naturally, we couldn't chat with each other because at one of the other tables was a pair of bitter 25-year-old women. Well, at least one of them was bitter. The other, like us, couldn't get a word in, because the noisy one was bitching about her boyfriend.

This was twisted on so many levels. First, if the guy is such a dolt, one wonders why she's going out with him. (Then again, somewhere deep inside, she probably realizes that a bitch like her would be lucky to get a date with the heroin addict that lives under the overpass.) Second, a major portion of the pain in her life is caused by her self-centeredness, which she amply displayed in two ways: A: Her boyfriend wasn't attending to her various (and mysterious) needs in the way she thought he ought. B: She thinks the entire world should hear about her trials and tribulations, rather than enjoying lunch and sensible conversation.

Third, and this is the kicker, her problem of the day was that she didn't like the Valentine's Day present he bought for her. He didn't cheat on her. He didn't borrow money from her and not pay it back. He didn't even forget an important holiday. He did everything he was supposed to do. I'd hardly call him "lazy", but she did. The key quote would be "I can't buh-LIEVE this dolt is too damn lazy to ask some of my friends what I might like as a gift!!" (Said with a voice that would peel lead paint off a barn.)

Oh, the bastard.

Oh, the poor bastard.

Tyr: I'm imagining the same scene one year later. The same conversation (is it really a "conversation" if
only one person talks?) about the same boyfriend (assuming he's dumb enough to still be with her) with the only change being that this year he did poll her friends and get some excellent suggestions for gifts. She of course is not happy, but this year her central theme would be "This helpless imbecile can't pick out a decent gift on his own, so he had to go around and ask my friends to find out what I like!!"

I feel in my gut that this really happened. Some people just have to gripe. Indeed, blog exists so that we (especially Thor) can vent a bit. It gets rough on the rest of the world, however, when the griper never quits, is unhappy with both situation P and situation not-P, and she's so freaking noisy about it. I'm guessing that, on one hand, if she'd shut her yap she could land a more suitable boyfriend. But on the other hand, she probably has a deep-seated need to have a boyfriend who daily commits infractions against her secret rule system.

In summary: They should get married so they can drive each other crazy more conveniently.

Tyr and Thor

Lotus Box

Thor: My new motto is "People are stupid." Even the people who aren't stupid are working dilligently to become stupid. I just spent 1.25 hours in a dentist chair listening to the prate of an airheaded mother of 4 children (who are all in their 20's, and I know, now, what each one of them does for a living and whether they graduated with honors.) But more than her children, she went on and on about her "spiritual journey". She just got back from India where she "studied" some sort of mumbo-jumbo on getting in touch with her inner person. Good God, lady, if you can't handle an adult religion, just say so. We all understand. I'm lying there with all this crap in my mouth, helpless to make all the sarcastic remarks that pop unbidden (OK, they were bidden) into my head. The brunt of her assault was that all these drug addicts were just extra-spiritual people who are seeking to return to the bliss of their former existance in the spiritual plane and mistake the euphoria of drugs for that bliss. Saints preserve us. She even said that the purpose of heroin was to prove to us that the spiritual plane existed. That a user is getting a true glimpse of the spiritual bliss that (gag) lives inside us all.

Anyone who's survived 4 teenagers should have experienced enough pain that such fluffy nonsense should register as a joke. I'm thinking that she must have been smarter in the past, and all this "studying" has really amounted to nothing but Stupid Lessons. Before she started poking my gums with that sharp...uh...poky thing, she asked me if I wanted gas or a valium. I declined. That was a mistake. I said "Mffss ssssth sssp, mm dhssng dd ssddn da sslng". Which translated is "Please shut up, I'm trying to study the ceiling." There was Musak playing in the room, and I had said something about it. She explained, at length, that it wasn't Musak, but some sort of ancient Indian chants done in a modern style. The fact that it sounds just like Musak and induces the same ennui as Musak seemed to have escaped her.

A greater mystery is how such a fruit basket cropped up in Texas.

Tyr: Heh, y'all should have seen the look on his face when he came out of the dentist's office. Imagine Mufasa discovering that Scar gave him a poodle cut while he was sleeping.

But I think people are stupider now because they have bad music pounded into their heads 24 hours a day. Every store, every restaurant, every bar, even my gym, has blaring music on all the time. Americans, and especially Texans, are loud people. No two Americans can sit at a table at lunch and have a quiet conversation, but must, instead, blow and guffaw so that even the kitchen help know what their problems are. Or they would know, if everyone else wasn't also yelling their heads off. As they drown each other out, they keep getting louder and louder. Then, since there's so much noise, someone will go ask to have the music turned up, which makes everyone shout even louder.

There's not a pub in all of Austin where you can go and chat with someone over a pint. At 3:00, some bad band is warming up their equipment and doing sound checks. People can't think anymore, or don't want to, and to help in that area, they keep their empty heads full of bad music. I guess they assume that if the music is loud enough, no one else will hear the stupid things they say.

At the gym this morning, the little pimple farmer who hands out towels and controls the music system had some non-music on with the volume turned up as high at it would go. The "singer" was going on about how his "slick black meat" was going to....um...subdue this female. At 6 a.m., everybody in the campus gym is faculty and staff. I'm pretty sure no one is under 40. Yet, if they're not blasting us with ghetto-hate-gang-banger crap, then we're getting shallow bubble-gum techno teeny-bopper crap. Or maybe some other crap. I love music, but I also like to entertain thoughts occasionally. At the gym, they have the music so loud that I, a Ph.D. in math, have trouble keeping count of my reps.

In summary: If one's head is painfully empty, there's a better solution.

Thor and Tyr

The 3F Rule

Thor: On the great universal list of health foods, constructed in order of healthiness, pizza is really close to the bottom. And I gotta' say, in terms of this list, I'm a bottom feeder. Ice cream, booze, burritos, cheescake, bratwurst inhabit my end of the health food list. I'm not alone here in my assessment. Nobody, in a quest for "a healthy meal" chooses pizza. So I'm very annoyed when I have to share a pizza with someone who wants to dress it up like health food. The finest pizza ever invented was the pepperoni pizza. It has everything you want out of pizza, and nothing you don't want (unless you're in a healtnut mood.) Why mess with perfection? It should be a felony to stack peppers, onions, seafood, jalepenos, or pinapple on a perfectly innocent pizza.

That's the 3F rule: No fruits, fungus or fish. Fungus is the worst. I hate mushrooms. I learned to hate them when I was a child and I've perfected my utter loathing of mushrooms into my adult life. If someone wants mushrooms on their pizza, then fine. But why push your religion down my throat? I've had the following conversation at least 12,000 times:

Self-absorbed airhead: Make sure you order mushrooms on the pizza.

Me: I hate mushrooms.

SAAH: But there good.

Me: You used the wrong "they're", and if you think they're good, fine. I hate them.

SAAH: But their gooooooooood.

Me: I'm not getting mushrooms on my half of the pizza.

SAAH: But you can hardly taste them!!

Me: (long pause) How can something you can hardly taste be "goooooooood"?

This is how I know it's a cult. Something tasteless tastes good. So good, in fact, that we have to get in a knock down fight over whether to spend an extra 50 cents to have them added to the pie. The Secret Brotherhood of Mushroom Fanatics is on a holy jihad to force everyone to eat fungus. It's like Dawn of the Dead. Once they stuff a mushroom down your throat, you become another willing zombie, helping to spread their disease.

Tyr: Yup. Consistency goes a long way. And I mean "consistency" in two ways. First, the consistency of a baked mushroom is indistinguishable from a body-tempurature slice of raw chicken liver. (And, due to an unfortunate prank played upon me by a certain sibling, I actually know this for a fact.) Second, humans should strive to be logically consistent. If a large group of "friends" descends upon Gatti's Pizza, they have to have their little meeting about how many pizzas to get and what to get on them. Some folks gotta' have surpreme, some have to have peppers and mushrooms. Then I insist on ordering at least 1/2 a pizza with just pepperoni (or double pepperoni, I'm not picky.) And what happens? We're on our 3rd pitcher of beer, and when I to the restroom to give some back, the pizza comes. By the time I return to the table, the plain pepperoni is gone.

Actions speak louder than words, and by their actions, everyone has confessed that I'm right about what the best sort of pizza is. Mr. Supreme hogged down two of my slices before he had any of the veggie slop he insisted on ordering. I should slice off his head and retrieve my pepperoni. Even in it's masticated condition, it would be more palitable than that pinapple crap that nobody's touching.

In summary: Eat your own damn pizza.

Thor and Tyr

The Exam

Thor: I'm at the age now that requires a guy to visit his doctor every couple years and receive what they innocently call a "physical". Frankly, I'd rather go to the dentist. It'd been about three years, so today I went in and got probed. And when I say "probed", I mean it in the most uncomfortable sense. Dad and Grandpa both had prostate cancer, so Dad is always on my case to "get scoped" regularly. So I go in. They try to lull you into complacency with the first part of the routine: "Grip my fingers, pull against my hand, now push. Deep breath. Again. Lie back. Any tenderness here? Here? Here? Sleeping ok. Open. Say 'Ahh'." Then they turn up the heat a bit: "Drop 'em and face me. Turn you head and cough. Again." Finally we get to the dreaded "Now turn around and place your hands on the table." This is the "physical" part of the physical.

Mind you, I really like my M.D. He's bright, doesn't chat a lot, and knows almost everything. And what impresses me even more is that occasionally I stump him and he very openly excuses himself so he can go look something up. You gotta' trust a guy like that. BUT! He's got the fattest damn fingers I've ever seen on an earthling. It takes him a full 5 minutes to get a latex glove stretched over his giant ham hands.

It's almost a dissapointment that "everything seems fine". If a guy puts himself through an ordeal like that, he'd at least like the comfort that we caught something in time, so the agony was somehow "worth it". Great. I'm healthy as a horse. A horse that drinks beer, smokes cigars and occasionally gets in a fight. I just paid a guy to stick his finger up my butt for no reason. The salt in the wound is my wife's parting comment this morning, "Don't let him start anything he can't finish."

Tyr: Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (HEEEEP!) ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha (snorrrrkk!)

I wondered why you were walking so funny this morning. A couple months ago I found myself in a group of very old men (miminum age: 70.) Old men talk about weird stuff, but these guys set some sort of record:

Zeke: I vent ta' haf my exam yesterday and dey gave me a voman doctor. She sure vas purdy, but deh best part vas her tiny fingers. Dat vas deh best exam I efer hat.

Zeb: That blonde at the VA? Oh yeah, she's nice. Slips right in and out, ya' hardly know she's been there.

Straight out of the Twilight Zone. But I suppose their morbid self-interest in bodily functions is what got these guys to 70 or 85 years old.

In summary: Don't eat giant black been burritoes the day before.

Road Putzes

Thor: What can put man in a more foul mood than worthless, stupid, idiotic drivers who cause untold amounts of trouble while driving somewhere they didn't need to go in the first place. I've met people who believe in the horrible congestion of traffic and, simultaneously, believe that they are driving the only car within a 100 miles.
If it's not an old man wearing a hat going 35 in the fast lane, then it's a soccer mom who's too busy handing out juice boxes to notice that her Hummer is taking up 3 lanes, or some frat boy who thinks normal driving entails dodging in front of pretty much everyone on the road. How many times has one of these naif's passed you on the left and then nearly taken off your hood ornament in his effort to get over to exit ramp on the right? And a trucker who's not an addict is a rare bird indeed. Especially the truckers who haul dirt and rock around to construction sites. We don't give disturbed junior high students automatic weapons, so what possesses us to give a brain-dead sociopath the keys to a 20 ton truck loaded with torn up asphalt? One of the reasons I don't believe in evolution is that if Darwin were right, the stupid-driver gene would have bred itself out of the pool by now. Surely these people don't live all that long, and if they do happen to reproduce, I'm sure the state takes the children away.

My next invention is going to be a roof-mounted bazooka so that I can blast a safe path for myself through traffic. I bet State Farm would give me a discounted rate for installing such a safety device.

But worse, and the point of today's ranting, is the Road Putz. A true Putz doesn't just drive 10 or 15 mph below the speed limit, but also speeds up just as you try to get around him. He rolls along prating on his cell phone or lost in a reverie, or singing along with his radio at the top of his lungs, competely unengaged with whether he's operating his deadly machine competently. But when you try to pass him, he blinks and comes to for a second. "Huh-YUCK! I reckon I'm goin' a bit slow. I better step on it."

It usually happens a couple miles before your exit. He's in the right lane and going exactly the speed limit. You slow down intending to follow him the short distance to the ramp rather than pass him like a frat boy. But then he starts slowing down. He's careful about this. If he slows down too fast, you'll have time and motivation to pass him and still make the exit. He keeps getting slower, but then again, the ramp is coming right up. Very frustrating. Finally, you stomp on the gas, since he's going only 25 mph now. But then the bastard does his little "wake up" routine, and accelerates to the speed limit again. You either miss the ramp or, more likely, do some sort of dangerous road-acrobatics to make your exit. Putz. Stupid putz. Stupid DMV that gave them a license. Stupid cops that won't shoot their tires out.

So guess what happened to me on the way to work this morning.

Tyr: I hope that was cathartic for you, my brother. You could just take the bus. I agree, of course, that the DMV is way too free about handing out licenses. And I like the bazooka idea. Here's my plan for a better future: Raise the driving age from 16 to 21. There are so many good reason for doing this and so many good results.

1. These delinquents need to be learning how to spell, punctuate, add fractions and find France on a globe, and this would sure give them time to do that. Instead of driving around pointlessly all afternoon and evening and night and early morning, or (if they actually have responsible parents who don't pay for their gas and insurance) working 20 hours a week as wage slaves to their vehicles, they could be catching the USA up to the rest of the world in academics.

2. The fuel savings for America would be tremendous, thereby ending the war in Iraq and pre-empting future possible wars in the Middle East.

3. Drug traffic would slow considerably since teen vehicles are the main transport device.

4. Teen pregnancy would plummet without ready access to backseats.

5. Traffic would be remarkably less congested. Not only that, but it becomes less congested by dint of taking the worst drivers off the road.

6. Adults who really need jobs, will be able to get them because A. The kids won't need them anymore and B. They won't be able to drive to them.

7. It would strike a very satisfying blow against the godless insurance companies.

8. Think of all the young lives that would be saved.

9. Perhaps best of all: Adults don't have car stereos that can flatten downtown just by turning up the base.

10. With these impressionable youth walking and biking more, we'd could win the war against obesity
by instilling such healthy habits.

11. Kids would have to learn self-responsibity at an early age, since getting themselves around would involve some advance planning. They might have to do chores before getting bus fare or a ride to the mall.

There just isn't any downside to this plan. The only thing preventing its implementation is the strong insurance and car sales (and repair) lobby. These black-hearted souls, rather than save tens of thousands of young lives, would rather take their money and put a weapon of self-destruction in their hands. And there's the soccer mom lobby, consisting of women who so exhausted themselves in overparenting their babies that they have no energy left to finish raising their kids. "Here the keys, take care of yourself." We'd have to fight them pretty hard.

Finally, all these kids drink, drive and kill themselves, and our response is to take away their beer rather than their car. Yet clearly the car is the dangerous thing here. If a guy was drinking and shooting up the street, would we take away his booze or his gun first?

Summary: Our driver's licenses have magnetic strips on the back. Our cars have computers in them. How about a slot in the dash that reads the license before the car can start?

Prosit,
Tyr and Thor

Our New Invention

Thor: If you can find something missing in the world, like fireant proof dog dishes or idiot-proof jetpacks, and figure a way to deliver it, then you can be rich. We don't need any more money, but there's still the reward of a public service well done. Tyr and I have cooked up quite a few inventions and haven't bothered to patent or market a single one. We offer them to whoever has more ambition than we do (and between the two us there's less ambition than in that old dog on the Hee Haw show) to make whatever capital they can. We don't even want honorable mention.

To wit: Friend, how often have you been walking along, paying a sensible amount of attention to where you're going and what you're stepping in, only to have some oblivious clod run directly into you because his two working synapses were fully engaged with his cellphone? Nobody's perfect, and everyone fades out once in a while, but this cell phone business is on a whole new plane.. The old adage is "If you automate a mess, all you get is an automated mess". Has the introduction of the cellphone done anything for us except enable the occasionally dim to be exceptionally dumb for extended peroids of time? Everyone has a story about the cellphone idiot who made a half-mile of cars wait through three extra red lights. And we know that in every single case, without exception, the cell conversation registered ZERO on the importance meter. And that's only because importance meters don't have negative numbers on their scales.

Somehow, at least to me, it's worse when cell obnoxiousness is committed amongst pedestrians in crowded areas like malls and campuses. Friend, don't you wish you had a solution? Enter the RatlPatl (TM). It's the kind of satisfying solution you'd expect from a guy who sleeps with a warhammer. Imagine one of those novelty giant fork and spoon sets like you'd hang on the wall of your kitchen if you had less taste. Now imagine throwing away the fork and that the spoon is made out of high impact synthetic rubber. Add a wrist strap and some grip tape and you'll have the idea. And you get the idea. Don't you?

ZzzwishPOP! And that loud bitch's phone is on the other side of the food court. With practice, a guy ought to be able to snick a phone from between ear and hand without attracting the young offender's attention. Heck, she's so lost in "thought" she may not notice for two or three minutes. It makes you feel all warm and tingly just thinking about it. "Does that rattle deserve a paddle? Reach for the RatlPatl!"

The LX model should come with a taser feature.

Tyr: Sweet. A public service and an aerobic workout. And what are they going to do? Sick the mall cops on you? Your new fan club should take care that problem, but if not, we have an invention for that too: Get one of those plunger dart guns and glue Stridex pads to the plunger parts. Five Stridex pads will pretty much completely erase the average mall cop.

I'm proposing a new sport: RatlPatl Mall Golf. Pick a place with a high concentration of airheads, say Clair's Boutique or Bed, Bath and Beyond, so that every player has a good selection of cell phones from which to choose. A "stroke" is any whacking of (or at) a cell phone. If the cell phone strikes another cell phone user, Player may move himself to that location. Otherwise, he must remain where he is and try again. The object is to work one's way, by means of the fewest strokes, from Claire's to Victoria's Secret. Victoria is its own reward, as we always say in Valhalla. I'm not sure how to work it in, but it ought to count extra points if Player lobs a phone into someone's Orange Julius. If you, Friend, have any ideas for improving the game, or just rounding out the rules, please submit them as a comment. After we work out all the kinks, we could have a webpage devoted entirely to the new sport.

In summary: Now how much would you pay?

Prosit,
Tyr and Thor

What's Good About Texas?

Thor:: My type-A-personality brother came up with the title question. He's challenging me to say something nice. I can be nice. If properly motivated. In this case the motivation is his promise to shut the heck up, sit still and quit flitting about for the rest of the afternoon. Texas has its faults, although it's pretty easy to get beaten up if one initiates a discussion on this topic and has left one's hammer at home. Texas has daylight saving time. While most of the US share this character flaw, it is, nevertheless, a character flaw. So the first nice thing about Texas is that it's no worse than anywhere else, at least in regard to setting clocks in the Summer.

When we first moved to Texas, folks warned us of the heat. "Aw, shucks, we used to have a week of 100 degrees every Summer in Nebraska", we'd say. Guess what. A week of 100 degrees is one thing. A week of 100 degrees after having one's brain melted for the previous 2 months of 100 degrees is a very different thing. The second good thing about Texas? We have air conditioning. When we lived up North, there was the annual endurance contest to see who could set the latest "We won't turn on the AC til" date. May 31st is a common choice. It's an idea that works in Indiana and Boston. But there are folk here in Austin who run their heaters in the morning and switch over to AC in the afternoon when it hits 80 degrees outside. We used to make fun of them, but we've joined the club now. Coming out of the hardware store, we remote start our cars, which have the AC set on "Full Arctic Blast", so that by the time we've waded through the liquid asphalt, we have a chance of not needing the asbestos gloves.

Finally, Texas is not France. Not being France is one of the loftier goals to which a political entity can aspire. But not only is Texas not France, it's bigger than France. In both area and military might. (Actually, I think Belize could give France a fair drubbing.) I'd say I've kept my half of the bargain.

Tyr: So my hammer-hefting wombmate offers the following three things as "nice" comments about Texas: 1. He finds himself no more grumpy about DST here than elsewhere, 2. There's a remedy for the unbearable heat and humidity, and 3. A left-handed complement which is really an insult to France, a delightful place of which I have many fond memories. He was griping, as usual, about sweating faster than he could chug Gatorade, and all I said was "What would it take for you to say 3 nice things about Texas?" and he starts going off on me.

I know full well that he loves it here, and not for the three non-reasons above. The best thing about Texas is the Mexican (and Tex-Mex) food. The French think they know something about cuisine, but nothing compares to the nectar these Mexican cooks put out. We both like it hot. I have some sauce in my fridge which isn't really food in the usual sense of the word, by which I mean a human being shouldn't consume it. I used it successfully as a solvent the time Thor epoxied my sword to the toilet seat. One drop in a can of Wolf's Chili will keep a guy regular for a week. Two drops and one discovers that one has taste buds on one's butt. And be sure and wash your hands really well before rubbing your eye.....or peeing.

Having been raised on German food, which is good, if somewhat square, the introduction to Tex-Mex was sure a revelation to us. I suppose it's similar to trading in your frigid British wife on a pair of hot Latino twins. A guy just has to admit that it's better, even if it's likely to kill him.

Another swell thing about Texas is the sentence "George Dubya used to be the governor here." Talk about a win-win scenerio. The republicans are happy to have their local boy do good. The democrats (and other miscellaneous parties) rejoice in emphasizing the words "used to be." Everyone's happy in Texas.

As far as the heat goes, the best advice we ever got about any subject whatsoever was given us by our first Texas pastor: "Aw, just pay it." The meaning here was "Don't try to be cheap when it comes to air conditioning.
Yes, it'll cost about $400 a month for six months of the year. Don't be stupid, just pay it." It took only 1/2 a Summer to drive this excellent bit of wisdom into our thick skulls.

In summary: Tex-Mex: Good. Getting kicked out of the same bar as Dubya's daughters, but for a different reason: Priceless.

Prosit,
Tyr and Thor

Steins Have Lids

Thor: "Why do steins have lids?" I'm not surprised that the wine-drinking, drive-by poster on rec.crafts.brewing didn't know the answer. I am suprised, first, that he cared and second, that so many regular posters also didn't know the answer. The homebrewing galaxy used to be populated by beer-drinkers, but it looks like we've been over-run by Vogons. French Vogons. French Vogon clothing designers who sip their brew out of fluted stemware and judge its quality, not by it's flavor and impact, but whether it's "true-to-style". True-to-style? "Congratulations, you've exactly reproduced the color, nose, bouquet, aroma, texture and flavor of a mass-produced swipes. It tastes like Clydesdale piss, but you win the gold medal." And I've heard this comment more than once: "Even though Bud has no flavor, no color and no alcohol, it shows that the Bud brewers are very skilled because they're so consistant." Right. I know a kid who failed College Algebra 12 times, but received no award for his consistency.

Grandma was consistent when she made bread. The mere sound of the crust breaking was a religious experience. It would never have occured to her that she might try to make a Wonderbread clone as a vehicle for demonstrating her baking skills or even her "consistency". She won ribbons at the county fair for decades, and not even once got a ribbon for almost perfectly copying a mass-produced, store-bought loaf.

Bread is grain and yeast. So is beer. When guests drink our beer for the first time, the consistent comment is "Oh man, that's the best beer I ever had." Thanks. That's what we strive for.

Tyr: I agree, but why do you have to be so heavy handed? At least the bad brewers keep the local homebrew supply stores in business and allow them to stock a wider variety of ingredients. And now the ingredients are fresher than they were in the old days, since turn-over is faster. You're sure right about the Wonderbread though. Heh, and I remember that guy in College Algebra. He wrote on his student evaluation that I was "sum bitch". His spelling skills were no better than his math skills, but he managed a great pun anyway.

I point out that in your fit of rage you 1. dented the tabletop and 2. forgot to answer the question. Answer: "To keep the bugs and leaves out." I don't mind fishing a fly or a gnat out of my stein, but once a small moth dove into my foam and left a layer of mothdust. I did my best to clean the exposed surface, but it turns out (and I suspect this is an official "little-known fact") that moth dust is quite flavorful (and not in a good way.)

While we never waste homebrew on beer judges, it hardly hurts anything if bad brewers do. Homebrew competitions are mostly about getting together and drinking, and not so much about who can make a better copy of Coors Lights. I suppose I should mention that "swipes" is an old, derogatory term for spoiled beer. Myself, I would have spelled it 'sswipes.

In summary: 1. Always use a lid. 2. Don't drink fizzy yellow water. 3. "Swipes" is a word which should be re-introduced.

Prosit,
Tyr and Thor