Mad Medicine
Open your mouth and say , “Aaaah” Do physicians even DO that any more? Well, according to an item in the Akron Beacon-Journal, you should not hand over your money before the doc sticks anything in your mouth. That’s because some researchers at New York University have discovered an absolutely stunning collection of bacteria, viruses (Or viri? Nope, virus...
Vegan Bar-B-Que
Once, many years ago, I ran across a book with the title, Hollywood Is A Kosher Nutburger. I think that I read it but who knows. At any rate, it struck me that it was a fine shorthand for “This place is nuts!” Well, the news lately—internet, the comics, the news pages, magazines—all of it, is proof that while time...
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...
Spoiler Alert
This is about the Portage County Park District, first in what will probably be a series of rants. Portage County DOES HAVE a park district. CATCH : Over 800 A of the land comprising the district are currently inaccessible because of a lack of funds. The budget has been severely cut, with the 2014 revenues projected to be only $99,500...
April Showers
April showers bring May flowers, eh? Somebody alert the providers of floral items. They’re either going to be left twiddling their thumbs because the general public is inundated by blooms of exotic sizes and descriptions springing up along every highway and by-way or their own backyards…or…there will be wholesalers of flowers lurking around corners trying to off-load cheap orchid and...
Out Like A Lamb?
Out like a lamb? Maybe a drippy-wet lamb. Maybe a lamb looking up at the occasional flurries and possible thunderstorms lurking in the wings next week. Baaaa! Enjoy it while you can. Quoting The Old Farmer’s Almanac here, “Showers often; the earth softens. Sunny and sweet. Watch out for sleet!” Sounds like Winter : Lite to me; a sunnier version...
Misguided Cats
Maplewood, beware! I’m thinking that the cats—at least some of them—need occupational/vocational counseling. One of the guys(It’s always the guys)apparently thinks that he is a watchcat, protecting us all from dangerous gray tiger cats out on the back porch. He pays no attention at all to the calico incipiently-maternal feline that appears on the front porch. When he spots this gray...
Gone…. GONE…. GONE!
The first department store in Portage County (Chic & Shabby/the Root Store)transformed into a source for home decorating with a distinctive touch…a craftsman fascinated by and devoted to clocks… a fledgling lawyer, an experienced attorney…the Barber of G-Ville…lawn and garden equipment gurus…a quilt shop drawing craft persons from all over the state and beyond…a podiatrist…an audiologist…a community food cupboard...
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...
The Old Farmer Says….
The Old Farmer says of the month of March (and I quote), “In like a sea lion, cold and wet with fishy breath. Rain to snow and snow to rain—di-si-do and back again! This month can’t be trusted; the hinge of spring has rusted.” Well, D’ya think? Good Grief! If it isn’t one thing, it’s another. The bit of doggerel above...
Whoa! Missed it Again!
Mardi Gras, that is. Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, beginning of the Lenten season. Carnavale, Carnival, Carnaval, Karneval, Faschtnact/Fasching…whatever your ethnic background, if there’s a shot of Catholic in there anywhere (or even if there’s no Catholicism but a lot of fun-lovers), you may be acquainted with Mardi Gras, one way or another. Some folk—like the ones in...
SANK
SANK! The word is SANK! The past tense of “sink” is “sank”…”sank”, not “sunk”. “Sunk” is the perfect tense, which is either being shamefully abused or ignored most of the time by people who ought to know better. If I have to listen to some talking head on a TV screen or hear a faux-authoritative voice on the radio...
Ragnarok
Well, here we go again. The Mayan “end of the world” didn’t pan out, so, now we can look forward to the Viking Apocalypse. It seems that in some enormously long poem in Norse mythology written in the 13th century by( Here’s a name to conjure with) Snorri Sturlson, the gods of just about everything and nothing have a whopper...
Spice of Life
Sometimes bon appetit, the 0h-so-upscale cooking magazine, is just too much. They just assume that everyone has access to—and a budget for—artisan cheeses and spirits, baby organic lettuces, at least four different varieties of milk…and we don’t mean simply whole, skim, 2% and buttermilk…oh no. You’re deprived unless the shelves boast the lactic fluid of cows, goats and maybe the...
This is Getting OLD
Don’t you just every so often look out the window or open the door or read the weather forecast and feel like the little boy on the internet the other day? The little guy must have been about four years old, bundled up to a fare-thee-well in mittens, hat , snowsuit and he was out shoveling snow, clearing the...
Curses!!
Curse that groundhog! Well, it does depend on which groundhog you are going to believe. The storied Punxsutawney Phil, of Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, according to his “handler” (like a sports agent, I guess) interrupted his long winter’s nap, peered out of his burrow and predicted six more weeks of winter. This would NOT be hard to do, given our experiences...
File Under…
File under “Sorry we missed this one.” New Years celebrators in London this New Year’s Eve were treated to an interesting array of flavored fun-type festivity-promoters. Indeed! There was banana-flavored confetti, there were orange-scented bubbles, peach-flavored snow, for starters. Mercy! So who first checked out this stuff? Somebody just stuck out his/her tongue and lapped up a healthy (?)...
Here’s Your Chance!
Here’s your chance to investigate the Mpemba Effect. There’s a video of some Canadian dude on the internet performing this interesting experiment. He takes a hard plastic water gun (A Nerf weapon would probably not work; you’ll see why)sucks up boiling water into it (That’s why you use hard plastic) and squirts the water out into the air. The...
Isn’t technology wonderful?
Sports Illustrated reports that there is now a “Smart Sensor” basketball(94Fifty) full of God-only-knows what kind of sensors, nine of ‘em, complete with circuit board, battery pack and Bluetooth relay—don’t ask—which will do amazing things for your mastery of the game. These sensors are processing whatever it is that’s happening with the ball, at your direction, of course, and...
Makin’ A List…
Now that the clock tower lights are lit, Santa has made the first of his (many) local appearances…for lunch, for breakfast, for pizza, etc….it’s time to get down to some serious shopping—preferably local, but wandering off into the exotic every so often. So, in pursuit of exotica (Try looking that up on the internet some times; Sears & Roebuck ,...
Old Farmers Almanac
I love the Old Farmer’s Almanac…I don’t necessarily take it as gospel but I do love the miscellany of STUFF that is in it. It is a veritable FOUNT of KNOWLEDGE of various off-beat and semi-useful pieces of information. I say semi-useful because some of the wisdom that this publication imparts, I would rather not have to actually have...
Comet ISON
AND…just in case you’ve been obsessing about the Comet ISON(International Scientific Optical Network—used by some Russian astronomers to first locate this fast-moving wonder) the one thing that most astronomers actually agree on is that it is highly unlikely to slam into the Earth, smashing us all to smithereens…that and the fact that nobody around right now is likely to...
Drawbacks To Unseasonable Weather
There ARE drawbacks to having a warm spell this late in the year. Yes, indeed. So…I’m sitting in the living room reading the paper; it’s a breezy, balmy (for November, anyway)fifty-something, sixty-something outside. The room is pleasantly warm enough. It’s evening, getting dark, I’m thinking about getting to bed early after a day that started fairly early for a weekend. Then...
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...
Rants in My Plants
Weeding and quite a number of other garden/lawn tasks are so essentially mindless that they offer “quality time” for pondering totally unrelated topics that may have “gotten under my skin”, “stuck in my craw(What IS a craw, anyway?)”, “graveled my gizzard”, “frayed my last nerve”…whatever idiomatic expression you might prefer. So I’ve been using the time, perhaps not wisely,...
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...
Fatberg!
Have another piece of cake, Chubby? OMG! New scientific research indicates that obesity is likely about three times as great a factor in mortality rates as had been previously believed, up from 5% to 18%. Some 78 million people in the U.S. are struggling with the condition…or not. Some twenty per cent of deaths in the 40-85 yr. age group...
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...
Treatise on Spell Check
Spell Check can’t do everything. I was at the Farmers’ Market at Robinson the other day. Small but interesting; an assortment of vendors with good stuff. Dave Stotler had Lodi apples, good for the first apple pies of the season. A lady from Randolph was there with a food truck that had been featured on WKSU’s “Quick Bites”. Great Harvest...
‘Tis the Season?!
“Tis the season! For just about everything, I guess. The other day, a container of blueberries and two squash magically appeared on my front porch sitting on some literature from the Jehovah’s Witnesses or some other well-meaning group and next to the comic strip umbrella from the AB-J. Tasty stuff! Then the model neighbors on the corner (You know who...
