Ho Ho HOLY COW! Already???

September, and Christmas is in the air!

Since it already feels like November here on the tundra of north Idaho, I hauled my carcass to Lowes for some varnish and cleaning materials intended for my wintertime amusement in the garage.  You see, every year I make big plans to keep busy on projects there is no time for when the sun shines and the waters of Lake Coeur D' Alene beckon.  No matter that I never get to said chores like varnishing the Adirondack chairs, replacing dead outdoor light bulbs, and other general repair items.  The fact that I have good intentions is all that really matters.  Maybe I'll get to them in the Spring?  Nah, time to put the boat in the water.  I'm no good at all that fixing stuff anyway.  My projects always depend on duct tape and hope.

So, there I am at Lowes on the 25th of September when I notice the hard to miss artificial Christmas trees, lights and indoor and outdoor decorations on prominent display in an area encompassing approximately one-quarter of the front of the store.  What the ???  When did this happen?  I remember as a kid my mother getting incensed when she spotted Christmas items in department stores right around Thanksgiving time.  "That's just not right," she would opine.  "We're giving short shrift to one of our true American holidays."  She was correct, of course, and I can recall thinking how angry she would have been when,  just a few years ago, Christmas displays began to pop up in retail outlets right next to the Halloween candy and costumes during early October.  Now, September??

How are you fixed for tree balls?

Naturally, Lowes is not alone in this new mercantile tradition of making Christmas a four-month retail orgy.  Home Depot is right there with them and Costco has had their Yuletide loot in the aisles for a couple of weeks now.  It's all about ringing the register.  Do those even ring anymore?  I think not.  There's another lost tradition that needs looking into. Somebody get on that right now and report back to me.

I'm not certain how much of the Christmas inventory moves off the shelves in September and October, but somebody must think it's good marketing to get it out there.  My strong suspicion is that the whole idea of Christmas in September is to jump start all the angst and guilt most of us feel when it comes to holiday shopping.  Eight or nine trips to Home Depot or Lowes will have a plethora of guys sweating what might happen if they fail to get their main squeeze that new rototiller for Christmas.  That's what she wanted, isn't it?  Or, was it the battery charger?  These situations are hard for those of us with the Y chromosome.   She'll understand, won't she? Good thing we have plenty of time.

"Only 100 shopping days 'til Christmas, buy now or I'll sit on you."

Who Loves Ya? Cats or Dogs?

 (This is a re-post from September of 2008)


My neighbor, Jai, got himself a new dog.  He named him Duke.  I figure I'm one lucky fellow to be living next door to a guy from Mumbai who digs his adopted country enough to name his dog after the actor who single-handedly won World War II without ever leaving Hollywood.  Cool dog.  Just make sure he takes care of business on the other side of the fence, neighbor.

I like dogs, had a couple as a kid and made sure that we were a doggy family when my girls were growing up, but can't say that I want another one.  Oh sure, dogs are all over you with that unconditional love and affection (not to mention drool), but they're so damn needy.  Ron Rosen, a columnist for the New York Observer, says "The love of a dog means nothing. Zero.  Dogs are the slavering sycophants, the slobbering indiscriminate flatterers, the boot lickers, the pathetic transparent brown-nosers of the domestic animal kingdom."  They are "an easy lay emotionally."  He is right!  Mans' best friend?  When was the last time your "best friend" pulled the pin on an ass grenade in your backyard?

Nope, no more dogs in my life.  Like elephants, they're fun to look at but you wouldn't want to own one.

Cats, I loathe.  Always have.  The girls had two of them when they were around and both "Murray" and "Satchel" hated my guts.  The good news was that they would actually leave the room when I would enter.  Perhaps that's how they made it to kitty old age.  A friend of mine, "Willie the Moff", used to have a regular zoo at his house.  There were dogs, cats, even horses that cost him a small fortune to maintain.  Several years ago one of his cats needed some veterinary attention because of an abscessed tooth.  Willie, being a man of thrifty Midwest ways, refused the vet's recommendation of a sedative for the cat prior to the necessary tooth extraction.  "The Moff" elected to hold the cat steady while the doc pulled the tooth.  No sense in paying the extra fifty smackers to send Sylvester to La La land while the creature was in pain.  The cat starred malevolently at his master on the car ride home, no doubt plotting his revenge.  Shortly after returning to "Moff Manor" the still hurting feline left a steaming pile of cat disrespect in the Moff's newly purchased leather briefcase.  Cats are like that.

I see no pets in my future.  Too much trouble.  Even fish have a hassle quotient I am unwilling to put up with.  Turtles might be alright.  If they croak on you, you've got a dandy looking ashtray.  If you don't smoke, I've got nothin' for you.  A chicken could be fun.  We all know who to call if that doesn't work out.

Gabby Hayes Was Ahead of His Time

"They're shot from guns, buckaroos!"

When I was a kid Gabby Hayes, a gnarly old cowboy sidekick, was on TV every Saturday morning pushing, among other things, Quaker Puffed Wheat and Quaker Puffed Rice, the cereals "shot from guns."  It made no sense to me as to how or why they shot perfectly good cereal from guns but old Gabby said they did and that was good enough for me.

Apparently, out of desperation, some of America's farmers are now cramming all kinds of produce into air guns and charging city slickers for the privilege of firing corn, apples, and even pumpkins into the wild blue yonder.  New tariffs and long slumping prices for most all things agricultural have inspired farmers to seek new ways to monetize their bounty and nothing is more American than firepower and a satisfying splat. It's all about the bottom line.  Corn is going for less than $4 per bushel on the open market and a guy like Fred Howell, a Cumming, Iowa farmer, can charge city rubes $2 a pop to fire four shots from his corn cannon.  That, farm friends, works out to roughly $100 a bushel.  The family who owns Hillcrest Orchard in Hendersonville, North Carolina added an apple cannon a couple of years ago and now sometimes has lines of people waiting 30 minutes or more to blast apples into applesauce.  Last year the orchard hauled in $20,000 in cannon proceeds easily defraying the $5,900 cost of the big gun.  The big daddy of food shooting ordinance has to be the pumpkin cannon at Stade's Farm & Market in McHenry, Illinois.  That bazooka, made from an old water main, is 42 feet long, weighs over a ton and shoots up to six pumpkins at a time.  Vern Stade, the owner, says he has pumped better than $30,000 into his master blaster and is not yet bragging about what kind of return shows up on his bottom line.

All of this countrified creativity got me thinking.  My brother and I have a small farm in central Illinois that, thanks to farmer Larry, pumps out ever-increasing amounts of corn and soybeans.  With prices so low we've been considering adding a distillery and, like the wineries do,  setting up a corn whiskey tasting room that would also feature all the edamame you can eat.  It's either that or buying a food cannon.  We Americans do like playing with our food so we'll give it a lot of consideration.  I'll ask Gabby what he thinks.  I'm guessing he'll be down for the whiskey tasting room and reasonably priced (see expensive) jugs of "genuine double rectified bust head."

"I figured you could use a little somethin' to get the trail dust out of your throat, Duke."

An Evening With Ed

9/11 Memorial

Most trips to New York find me taking time to wander down to the financial district to marvel at the wonderful new World Trade Center and the 9/11 Memorial.  The memorial is both beautiful and sad.  Nearly 3,000 lives taken by a heinous act of third world lunatics is breathtaking in its stupidity.  I say a little prayer as I stare at the names on the low wall surrounding the cascading waters falling into nothingness.  Every American should visit this sacred place at least once.


The new Trade Center buildings are a magnificent testament to our American resilience.  It's inexcusable that because of our overly litigious society it took more than fifteen years to rebuild this New York icon.  After all, in the depths of the Depression, this country built the Empire State Building in a little over a year.  Why was it impossible to cut through all the legal red tape to demonstrate to the world that America could get off the mat and show those who hate us that we are still a can do nation?  This used to be a given.

In the summer of 2003, I got a call from an old Army buddy of mine.  I was living in San Diego and Ed and his wife were in town for a couple of days and wanted to get together.  The two of us had met in officer's training at Fort Gordon, Georgia in 1971 and had stayed in touch through the years.  We were only in Georgia for a few months but, like it is with some people, we had enough in common for a friendship to have endured long distance.  He's a good guy.

Ed made the Army his career.  I thought he was nuts, but he was made of sterner stuff than I.  He retired as a Colonel after thirty years and continued to work at the Pentagon as a civilian employee of a government contractor after that.  He became an expert in satellite communications and, though he would modestly deny this, is a leading expert in that area.

My wife had a school function that evening so I joined Ed and his wife, Ilse, at their hotel and we headed for dinner at a quiet little place on the water at Shelter Island.  It was going to be fun catching up with them.  Somewhere between the main course and dessert it suddenly hit me that Ed was most likely to have been at the Pentagon when American Airlines flight 77 crash-landed
 there on 9/11.

For the next hour or two, I hardly said a word.  (Rare for me, I know.)  Ed looked out over San Diego Bay and slowly began to tell me of that horrible afternoon of September 11, 2001.  "First of all," he said.  "The best place to be on that day was the smokers' area."  "There is a courtyard type place deep inside the 'puzzle palace' where smoking is allowed."  "That day it was the safest location in the building."  He went on to tell me of the jolt and tremendous noise everybody felt and heard when the plane struck the building and the shock and disbelief of walking through the smoke and chaos to get outside.  It was a nightmare from which it was impossible to awake.  When he escaped the structure there were emergency vehicles and medical personnel everywhere.  His first thought was to call his wife who also worked in the area to see if she was alright.  She was.  For the rest of the day, he volunteered to help the rescue workers.  He spent all day holding plasma bags for the wounded and lending a hand with stretchers while he tried to make sense of it all.  He did what he could.  Unlike me, Ed has seen war and yet I could tell that this day had left a profound impression on him.  Just listening to the story made for an evening I will never forget.

This story has been on my mind lately for obvious reasons.  It seems, and I hope I'm wrong here, that it's eighteen years on and some of us are already starting to forget what happened to this country on September 11, 2001.  If that's the case, we're in real trouble.  The biggest problem with being the best country in the history of mankind is just that.  It's easy to relax and take everything for granted.  We delude ourselves into thinking that the rest of the world likes us and shares our values.  Mostly, they don't.  This may come as a surprise, but most don't care about who wins the Super Bowl or the World Series.  Hell, they don't even have high def!  There are far too many in Washington and in the population in general who embrace the wrong-headed philosophy of "Be nice to everybody and they'll be nice to us."  Realists know that the world doesn't work that way.  Most of the world would gladly back the car over grandma to score a ham sandwich.

On September 11 let's all pause to remember our fellow Americans who were murdered on their home soil just eighteen years ago and promise to keep them in our hearts forever and to NEVER forget.