Yes Virginia, There Really Is A Spring
So.... I’m walking along early in the morning now and there are more and more bird sounds out there to be heard. During the winter there are always a few--cardinals, goldfinches, the ever-present sparrows, miscellaneous die-hards who have memorized the locations of every birdfeeder within several hundred yards. You also get the occasional Wrong Way Corrigan who wandered here...
That was a fine old time!
That was a fine old time! Well, if you weren’t trying to get anyplace in a hurry, that is. The annual Garrettsville community garage/yard/porch sale seems to have attracted quite a crowd for most of the weekend. Some of the narrower thoroughfares were a challenge for those just trying to get into their own driveways. Down Park Ave. some savvy...
Haunts At Home
With Halloween coming up and all, I think that I’ll have to admit that I think that the house seems to be haunted. Not just by the bats who make periodic appearances (Though not—can I hear some knocking on wood out there—just lately) thupp-thupping around inside the place, from living room to dining room to kitchen and...
If It Isn’t One Thing…
If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. We’ve finally seen the end of the political ads (Do you ever get the feeling that the only reason we have elections is to find out if the polls were right?—Robert Orben). The signs should all be picked up until the next go-round and we can listen to the moans of the losers...
A Bad Spell
It wasn’t pretty. The brain trust here at the Weekly Villager sallied forth to adventures in orthography by participating in the22nd Annual Community Spelling Bee for Literacy, co-sponsored by the Portage County Literacy Coalition Community Partners at the NEOMED Conference Center on Friday, May 24, 20013. And fourth…maybe fifth… was about where we wound up…out of five. Like lots of vital...
The Name Game
Speaking of winter storms.... This whole naming thing apparently started with the Weather Channel and a Latin class somewhere. This was apparently so that the on-screen prognosticators could get us all to focus on a particular weather event at a particular time and to nudge us toward acknowledging the fact that all of this weather stuff is related rather...
The End
O.K. So I want to invite everyone to the second annual M-O-M / T-A-T (Machine -O-Mania / Touch-A-Truck) coming up--rain or shine-- on Sunday, May 22 from 10:00 to 2:00 at J. A. Garfield H.S.; admission: adults--$5.00, kids--$3.00. It’s a fund-raiser for the Garfield Academic Challenge team, the QuizMasters, and gives kids of all ages a chance to see...
The machines are out to get me!
Does a computer count as a machine or a device? Matters not, they’re after me. So I’m sitting at the computer typing away at my much-anticipated column for this week, when, out of the blue—or whatever color cyberspace is nowadays—the screen went black (that color I know) and totally unresponsive. I wiggled and jiggled various plugs and...
Christmas Walk Finale
The Christmas Walk must be over; a cat just upchucked on the carpet. They’ve been ticked off for two week-ends now at being shut down in the basement. The saying is that “revenge is sweet” but that’s not quite how I’d describe this ( I’ll spare you how I would describe it.). All-in-all, that’s pretty small potatoes compared to what...
O Spring
O.K., it’s Thursday, this must be springtime. Holy cow! What a wild one! Haul out the long johns, Maudie, the daffodils done froze! And what does the Old Farmer say? Not much. But you’ll be happy to know that on April 18, 2009, Aaron Caissie set a world record by balancing 17 spoons on his face. Now there is a...
A Fungus Among Us
The computer strikes again! Here I am typing away at my keyboard-in-the-corner, writing what I’m hoping will be more-or-less reproduced below and—WHAM! It all disappeared. Gone! Gone! Nowhere to be found(Not that I could find it anyway, technological klutz that I am). Nearly a page of deathless prose lost into the ether of cyberspace. What’s REALLY irritating about it...
May You Live In Interesting Times
There is , allegedly, an ancient Chinese curse, which says, “May you live in ‘interesting’ times”. Last week was really interesting. First off.... I have been waiting for and keeping an eye on the paw paws on the finally-mature paw paw bush on the east side of the house. There are only two bushes and only one of them had fruit...
Forget the Memoir
Everybody is writing memoirs lately. It’s the literary style du jour in all of the magazines and reviews. So I’m thinking, hey, my memories are as good as anybody’s, why not hop to it and make the big bucks? One reason may be that my memories are certainly just fine, but getting them to show up on cue is...
Time Flies
My, how Time flies! Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. So, if the line above is an example of a “garden path sentence” or syntactic ambiguity or a pun, a double entendre or an antanaclasis—well, it would be, wouldn’t it—possibly by that great linguist, Groucho Marx, these recent weeks have been an example of pandemonium! (from the...
Oxford English Dictionary and then some
The Oxford English Dictionary has just come out with its quarterly revisions and additions. Some nine hundred new words and phrases have now been deemed worthy to grace its pages, some of them pretty far out there. How often do you wish to know the meaning of Empedoclean? ( Don’t go there. It’s about some Greek philosopher dude named...
Excitement!!
Pretty generally, my cats are NOT about excitement. Mostly, they’re about conserving physical resources, i.e., lazing around, with as little movement as possible. Oh sure, there is the occasional wrestling match, when one of the “guys” has to show how tough he is(This is the same one who is afraid to go outside when the door is open; he...
Turnpike Proud!
Well, that was interesting...and informative...and fun too. The Ohio Turnpike had an Open House on Saturday, October 24, celebrating its 60th Anniversary; it officially opened on October 1, 1955, all 241 miles of it. The construction took 38 months, in sections, employed some 10,000 workers—and 2300 bulldozers—at a cost of some $326 million, give or take. It connected to the...
Lights Out!
And speaking of eclipses…. Isn’t everyone? It’s all over the place, and with pretty good reason, since it’s been quite some time—38 years isn’t it—since the last total eclipse of the sun was visible over significant portions of the United States. It’s also the first since 1918 to be visible from coast to coast, AND the first since 1776 to...
Weekend Travels
Well, that train left the station without me aboard. I had been planning to take the Portage County Farm Tour but it turns out that it was held on Saturday instead of Sunday and my schedule was all wrapped around the Aurora Band show, Thunder Over Aurora, so it was a setback to open the Record on Sunday and see...
Plate City
Once upon a time, specific clerks dealt with specific operations and the issuer of license plates might be snowed under with people waiting and waiting, while the driver’s license clerk was able to sit at her leisure to examine the new nail color that she had chosen and tempers tended to shorten as the wait time lengthened. Well, that’s done with…and none too soon.
Cats Up To No Good
Well, it’s finally here! My sure-fire, brass-bound, copper-bottomed, iron-clad, nickel-plated, sterling silver, gold standard (Had enough of the metallics?) opportunity to live in the manner to which I’d like to become accustomed has arrived. Yes! Reading through one of my weekly newsmagazine—appropriately enough named The Week—I came across an item about an entrepreneur, Lainey Morse, in Oregon who...
Coming This Summer….
So, vacation time is here. What to do? Where to go? How about museums--educational, right?--of culinary phenomena? You could start with the National Mustard Museum( formerly the Mt. Horeb Mustard Museum) in Middleton, Wisconsin, found on the National Registry of Hysterical Places, perched atop the Condimental Divide. It features over five thousand various mustard-filled items from some sixty countries and...
Ya Shoulda Been There!
Ya shoulda been there! “There”, in this instance was actually two places where it was all happenin’ last week. Not genuinely related places, really, but there were similarities, fo’ sure. The first one was the business-to-business open house at Facet Salon and Day Spa on Tuesday, August 6. The parking lot at the TLC was hopping and they weren’t all in...
What We Got For Christmas
Y’ know that old pop/novelty song, “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”? He sort of lisps and whistles through the tune. Real cute. Ever wonder what the kid actually GOT for Christmas? (This is all sort of a segue into the next topic, which is what I got for Christmas, which, as it applies to humans...
My Kind of Month
October is my kind of month. It’s interesting. The harvest is winding down; those shocks of corn so prized by decorators are actually passe’ . Nobody uses them any more, unless they’re Amish, of course. Corn pickers are where it’s at as far as harvesting corn is concerned. They’re also one of the reasons why farming has always ranked as...
Der Tag…the Day is upon us!
It’s beginning to look a lot like....O.K., who left the Clint Eastwood glam pin-ups on the fridge? Get them down right now and put them with the Chuck Klamer voodoo figurine...the one with the pins in it. Put a red bow on the top; it’ll work. Yes, Virginia, there IS a Christmas Walk and it’s coming this way. NOW! The outside...
Business Plan?!?!?
Awwwrighty-tighty, here’s the plan. Dick, Larry, Casey…. Listen up! What you need to do is put the entire village of Garrettsville under roof, hire all or nearly all of the inhabitants and you can play in the big leagues with the Hartville Hardware which just had its grand opening last weekend. Holy Schmoley! The place needed a map to direct customers to...
Rambutan? Huh?
Please pass the rambutan. Right. I didn’t know what it was either but it was mentioned in a recent filler article in the R-C. I’m not sure what’s behind it but there seems to be a rash of “record-setting” events and/or activities of all kinds that seem to be, basically, pointless. I imagine that the folks down at Guiness must...
Christmas Shopping
I sure hope that I get the hang of this “Christmas shopping” thing soon. I always think that I will get a head start on it --August, say--and have gifts all wrapped and ready, tucked away somewhere (Attic? Basement?) so that the holiday rush will be a thing of the past. Well, so far what’s...
Reflections…
Heroes have been celebrated in song and story for generations and millennia. One local hero has lately left us--too soon--and three songs/poems come to mind. #1. Gilbert & Sullivan’s 1879 “Pirates of Penzance” contains a “patter song” titled “The Major-General’s Song” in which the gentleman referred to sings, ”I am the very model of a modern major-general.” Now Craig Moser would...
