It isn't just a day late and a dollar short; it's a day and a month late and $32 short.
Spring started March 20. I didn't note it then. I wish I had, because I had gone through a bad time. These are the two mail reasons:
- The death of my parents late last year.
- The weather during January and February was terrible.
I wanted to post this picture to celebrate the start of spring, but I hadn't until now. But better late than never -- in fact, much, much better.
I know the women are naked, but the picture is more or less art, and not even cheesecake, let alone erotica or pornography.
Ah/Yes.
Oh/No.
Eh/Maybe.
Uh/Whatever.
Ih/I don't care.
Huh/What?
Heh/You expect me to believe that?
Hoh/That's surprising!
Hah/Now that's funny!
Ugg/That's disgusting!
I was going to post about the NCAA Final Four, which was played last weekend at Lucas Oil Stadium in downtown Indianapolis. But last Tuesday, I had Final Four illness: Too much talk about the movie Hoosiers, David vs. Goliath, etcetera and etcetera and etcetera.
It was as if I was sick from eating too much of one food at one time. But it was a mental and psychological sickness from too, too much hyperbole.
Then I was going to post my views on it no later than yesterday. But I changed my mind because too much time has passed since the event . If you want more details, type "Butler Basketball" into the search engine of your choice and go at it.
By the way, Duke beat Butler 61-59 in the title game last Monday night. Bulldog forward Gordon Hayward missed a halfcourt shot with one second left. If it had gone into the basket, central Indiana would still be reverberating from the win.
I honestly didn't expect the Bulldogs to get through the regional, but they defeated Syracuse and Kansas State to get to the Final Four. Then they defeated Michigan State to get to the title game.
I was cheering on the Bulldogs to win, for this main reason: My parents met as students at Butler after the Second World War. If they had not met, they would not have married each other. And from that, I would not have been born.
Another reason was the fact that they ARE a local team, after all.
Because of those reasons, during the tourney I wished my parents were still alive -- or at the least my father, because he would've appreciated it more.
As one last comment about the tourney, please read this link for some comments from deadspin.com, the one sports site on the web that I read every day. Warning -- it isn't for those who can't appreciate irony -- sarcasm's cousin with a liberal arts degree.
Since the tourney is over, I doubt if I'll post any more about sports until the fall, when football season starts. That is, if I post about sports at all in the future. I have my misgivings about spectator sports. I plan to post something about them later.
As I was going through some old notebooks, I came across this writing exercise that I did in May 1995. It was based on the book I Remember, a memoir by the artist Joe Brainard about his youth in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and young adulthood in New York City.
Brainard wrote down the words I remember, then followed them with the first thing that came into his mind.
Many writing instructors use the exercise as a prompt to get their students to write something.
Here are my writings, with some additions to clarify them. Most of the incidents happened when I was in grade school.
*
*
I remember pissing in a Coca-Cola bottle or can while my family was on a long trip or vacation, and my older brother opening the back door of my family's car to pour it out.
***
I remember the Burma Shave sings on the side of the road west of my home town. We drove past them as we went to my matern' al grandparents house. They were on the north side of U.S. 40 between our county roads numbered 200 West and 300 West. They stayed up there until 1966 or 1967.
***
I remember the cool feeling on the back of my head after my mother gave me a haircut in our back yard during the summer. Back then, I had a burr or lived in Buzz City.
***
I remember Fred C., a classmate of mine in second grade, telling me about life in the Soviet Union, and how the teachers told the schoolchildren to pray to God for ice cream, and how the schoolchildren didn't get any ice cream, and then the schoolchildren were told to pray to Krushchev for ice cream, and that it was carried into the classroom -- probably by KGB agents, though Fred didn't say if they were that -- I doubt he knew about the KGB back then. He's now a retired cop.
***
I remember Scholastic Magazine, every week, showing a map of the Communist dominated countries in red. (This was in 1961-62, when I was in second grade.)
***
I remember going to a football game where my older brother was playing during the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the adults in the crowd silent and quiet with fear.
***
I remember watching Jack Paar's show -- this was after he left The Tonight Show -- which was broadcast at 10 a.m. Fridays on NBC. I stayed up to watch it because it wasn't on a school night, it seemed very sophisticated to me.
***
I remember the first runs of many episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show.
***
I remember one episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show where Buddy Sorrell was finally bar mitzvahed. It happened when he was an adult. His family couldn't afford it when he was 13 because they were poor. (When I saw the episode sometime within the last decade, Buddy's coworkers were worried because he was sneaking around meeting with a woman who was not his wife. However, she turned out to be the wife of the rabbi who was instructing him, and there was no affair between them.) It was the first time I had know anything about contemporary Judaism, because what I knew about Jewish people I had read in the Old Testament.
***
I remember the time I had worms from eating dirt in the back yard of my house, and the purple pills I had to take to kill them. My parents forced them down my mouth, and they seemed huge (I was six or seven at the time). Plus, they tasted terribly.
One night in November 1993, as I was driving east on 56th Street right before its interchange with I-465, I ran over a possum going from the north side of the road to the south side.
I knew I hit it because I could hear the thump of my tire as I drove over it.
Then I felt guilty: Possibly more guilty than necessary.
I hadn't meant to kill it and hadn't swerved soon enough to prevent the accident.
More importantly, I felt guilty because I killed something that looked semihuman in the head and face: Like either a bald old man in a fur coat or a bald, wrinkled baby in a fur blanket.
On the cover of a recent edition of Entertainment Weekly is a picture of Tina Fey and Steve Carrel, who will appear in a comedy entitled Date Night, which will open this coming weekend.
A tagline on the cover says that, in the movie, hilarity ensues.
TOUCHE! A CLICHE!
I've read that too, too many times in reviews of comedies. I've never read the word ensue used in another context. More importantly, I've never heard any body use it in their everyday conversation.
The word's definition is to take place as a result of something. A synonym is follow.
Here's an example: After I heard the thunder far off in the distance, rain ensued.
It isn't just a day late and a dollar short; it's a day and a month late and $32 short.
