Friday Night Music
Ask, and You Shall Receive
About a week ago, Cindy told me, “There’s a plant growing by the highway that I want to dig up and put in our yard.” I wasn’t sure I had heard her right.
“What kind of plant? By the highway where?”
Turns out the plant was a hollyhock, and it was growing in the shoulder along the interstate near our office. “Will you help me dig it up?” Cindy asked me. I refused, for a couple of reasons that seemed really good to me. First, doing much of anything along the shoulder of an interstate while traffic rushes by just feet away is a lot more dangerous than most people recognize. And second, that land belongs to some government agency that might just take offense to some random person digging up plants along their right of way. I might not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but I am not going to jail for a plant.
“That’s okay,” Cindy told me. Turns out one of her co-workers was willing to risk arrest and hood ornamentation in order to help her get this plant dug up. “Just be ready to come post bail if we need you to,” said Angie, the co-worker in question.
Later that day, Cindy came over to my desk at work. “One of the guys from NDOT was in here a while ago. I told him I wanted that hollyhock, and he said it’s okay with him if we dig it up.”
“What was his name?” I asked.
“Leonard,” she replied.
“Right,” I said. “So when some state trooper has you standing up in front of his car along the side of the highway, and he wants to know why you’re digging up the shoulder, you can just tell him Leonard said it’s okay. That should keep you right out of trouble.” She pouted a little, and finally gave up on the idea. The next day Angie came to work with a couple packets of hollyhock seeds she had bought at Wal-Mart, and gave one to Cindy for a consolation prize. “Now,” they reasoned, “we won’t have to dig up the highway shoulder, and we won’t get hit by cars or go to jail.”
Fast forward to this morning. We get guys from various state agencies in our office pretty regularly for one thing and another, so I didn’t think much of a guy in an NDOT uniform going over to Cindy’s desk and talking to her briefly. When he left, she came over to my work area, grinning from ear to ear. “Go look in the break room,” she told me.
I did, and couldn’t believe my eyes.
That would be a hollyhock plant.
As it happened, the NDOT guy I saw talking to her was none other than the mysterious Leonard from a week ago. “I was passing by, and decided to stop and dig up the plant,” he told her. “If I dig it up instead of you, I’m just doing my job.” Rather than throwing it away with the other weeds, he left it at the back door of our office for her, roots stuck in a bag of dirt.
“I got my hollyhock after all, and didn’t have to go to jail for it,” Cindy told me, laughing.
Looks like I’ve got another hole to dig.
Clever
Watching TV the other night, I happened to catch an advertisement for the Cosmopolitan Hotel here in Vegas. I tend not to pay much attention to TV ads, generally speaking, unless they’re ads for attorney services – in which case I feel compelled, on principle, to heap withering scorn and abuse upon the attorneys so advertised.
So it was that the commercial was about half over before I realized what they were doing – and brother, it was awesome. Check this out.
You’re welcome.
Another Awesome Unicorn-Flavored Obama Success Story
First there was the high-profile Solyndra debacle, in which the “green energy” business Obama touted as such a good investment tanked after receiving $527 million dollars in government funding. Now we hear that J.P. Morgan Chase Bank, recipient of a $25 billion government bailout, has managed to lose $2 billion dollars since the beginning of April.
TWO BILLION EFFING DOLLARS IN A MONTH AND A HALF! That’s how much the trading geniuses over there lost. There’s a hell of a return on our $25 billion in “stimulus” money.
Guess they were really worth saving, weren’t they, Barry?
What’s In a Name?
One year while I was a kid growing up, my friends and I used to spend a lot of time playing Monopoly. You know, the board game. Remember board games? It’s what we used to do to pass the time back in those prehistoric dinosaur days before video games, cell phones, personal computers, and cable TV. Well, that and riding bikes. And playing baseball, and football, and soccer. And fishing. And building model airplanes. And lots of other things that I wonder, sometimes, if youngsters still do anymore.
We had lots of games to choose from, but the poison of choice amongst my group of friends (that year, anyway) was Monopoly. Get a good game of Monopoly going between seven or eight kids, and it could last for days, weeks even, before it finally came to an end – presuming nobody’s sister came and moved the pieces around the board and screwed with the money while we weren’t looking.
One year – I was probably nine years old or so – this one kid’s dad built a little clubhouse for him in their garage. It was a wooden-framed affair about eight feet square, with a couple big windows in the walls and a rug on the floor and some old couch cushions for everyone to sit on and a lamp for light. It was a good spot to sit and hang out and stay out of trouble, and it gave us the illusion of privacy as well as a place to set up our games without getting in everybody else’s way. Being boys, we immediately dubbed it a “fort,” and decided that since we had a fort we needed a club with a cool name.
“Let’s call it the Gun Club,” my friend said.
“What are we going to do?” someone asked.
“Play Monopoly,” he replied.
“Are there guns?” I wanted to know. (Yes, even then…)
“No,” my friend said. “No guns. Just Monopoly.”
“Well, why are we the Gun Club, then? If all we do is play Monopoly? Why don’t we call ourselves the Monopoly Club?”
“Gun Club sounds cooler.”
We decided everyone we knew was a de facto member of the fledgling Gun Club. It was possible to get kicked out of the club for marginal behavior, but that usually only lasted about 20 minutes or so before the offender was forgiven and reinstated.
We spent any number of weekends and part of the summer holed up in that fort, happily playing marathon sessions of Monopoly and the occasional checkers grudge match. I don’t remember what eventually happened to each of those kids; by the time school started later that year a couple had moved away, and others had lost interest in the game, and sooner or later our little group was no more.
It was fun while it lasted, though. And we had a really cool name.
Friday Night Music
Inspiration
Cindy was watching some TV show the other night where they were showcasing “celebrity” homes. I wasn’t particularly interested, since I didn’t know who any of these people were and it isn’t really any of my business how they live in any case.
I did happen to catch one part where this ditzy woman was carrying on about the significance of a motto she had painted on the wall of her living room. It was in Latin for some reason I didn’t catch, and she claimed it meant something along the line of “live, laugh and love every day.” I started to dismiss the whole idea of painting warm, fuzzy sayings on your wall as nothing more than a bunch of mystical hippy BS…but later on I got to thinking: she might just be on to something. And I believe I’ve figured out what wisdom I’d like to paint on the living room wall at Casa Mike.
Anybody know how to say, “Crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of the women” in Latin?
Look! In the Sky! It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!
It’s…Supermoon!
Okay, actually it’s not, but last night’s moon was what is commonly known as a “super moon.” Or, as the actual experts say, it was this year’s “perigee moon,” the moon that rises closest to the earth due to the eccentricities of its orbit. This means the moon looked some 14% larger and 30% brighter than on any other day as it rose last night, an effect that was even more noticeable given the fact that it was in the full.
Not sure how he fits in a phone booth when he needs to change clothes...
Cindy and I stood outside for 20 minutes or so at dusk watching the moon rise, and it was very nice. We could see the features on its surface really well – and I’ve gotta say, it always trips me out just a little when I look at the moon and think that twelve men have actually walked up there. So very cool.
Friday Night Music
Where’s Smokey the Bear When We Need Him?
I was shooting one day many years ago with my friends Ron and Junior. Since something like 80% of all the land in the state of Nevada is owned by one federal agency or another, it’s not hard to find areas out in the desert where recreational shooting is permitted. The day in question we were on Bureau of Land Management land somewhere near Lake Mead. We had followed a dirt road two or three miles from the highway to a place where a hillside made a perfect natural backstop, and after a quick recon of the area for any sleeping vagrants or errant girl scouts we set out some targets and went to work.
After a while, Ron came up to me while we were changing targets. “I brought some dragon’s breath rounds,” he told me, holding up an orange shotgun shell. “Let’s see what happens when I shoot one.”
Now, a dragon’s breath round, for those of you who don’t travel in the same circles I do, is a shotgun round that acts more or less like a 12-gauge flamethrower. The cartridge contains a flammable metal compound (usually magnesium or zirconium) that ignites when the gun is fired, spewing fire and bits of flaming metal out to a distance of somewhere around 30 or 40 feet at temperatures up to 4000 degrees. It’s a particularly nasty round because not only does it set fire to any flammable substance it hits, but the flammable metals it contains will continue burning until (a) they’re totally consumed, or (b) there’s no more available oxygen in the air around them. If you’re visually inclined, here’s a video for you:
The area where Ron, Junior and I were shooting had a fair amount of dry scrub brush growing at intervals, which made me think that maybe, just maybe, shooting a flammable substance out into it at random might be a bad idea. I told Ron so.
“It’s okay,” he replied. “I’ll shoot it into the air. It’ll stop burning before anything hits the ground.”
Before I could say anything more, he shoved the shell into his shotgun and fired it into the air. I had to admit, the results were visually rather disappointing. I expected a brilliant yellow-orange tongue of fire to come roaring out of the muzzle. Instead, some pale white specks, barely visible in the bright sunlight, shot up into the air, trailing a thin stream of smoke, then disappeared. It looked as though Ron was right. After spending half a minute or so inspecting the area where it looked like any fragments would have fallen, I couldn’t see any sign of a fire, and I turned away in relief.
“Crap,” I heard Ron say behind me. I spun back around to see Ron charging downrange with a jug of drinking water in his hand, running toward a plume of smoke that was now rising from a small bush about 50 feet away. Junior snatched up a shovel and followed hard on his heels. I paused just long enough to grab a fire extinguisher out of my truck, then headed after them. When I got to the burning bush, Ron was pouring water on it, which seemed to be putting the fire out – until he stopped, and the bush burst into flames again. Remember I said earlier that burning flammable metals are hard to put out? Yeah. Out of water, Ron retreated toward his car to get another jug. Visions of the three of us fleeing down the road, pursued by a roaring wall of flame as the fire engulfed bush after bush, danced in my head as I pulled the fire extinguisher pin.
After 30 or so frantic and seemingly endless seconds of Junior shoveling dirt onto the flames as fast as he could while I blasted them with the fire extinguisher, the fire finally went out without spreading to any of the other nearby scrub. Heaving a collective sigh of relief, we all packed up our gear and left. Sir Knight wasn’t there with us, but if he was, I bet he would have had something to say to Ron.
The lesson for that day? In addition to scrupulously observing the traditional Four Rules of firearms safety while shooting, a little common sense goes a long way – especialy if you like to play with nontraditional or specialty ammunition. Things could easily have turned out much worse, and we were very lucky they didn’t.
Want a little more dragon’s breath goodness, just for fun? Here’s another video on shotgun specialty rounds. The dragon’s breath action starts at about the 4:25 mark, although the other rounds are fun to watch, too. Just do your best to ignore the horribly ugly, pimped-out shotgun the guy is using.
