Echoes from the Loafers' Club Meeting
I'm too tired to go anywhere today.
That's a shame.
It’s OK. I have nowhere to go.
Driving by the Bruces
I have two wonderful neighbors — both named Bruce — who live across the road from each other. Whenever I pass their driveways, thoughts occur to me, such as: I’m man enough to admit when others are wrong. If a hotel has bad curtains, it's a bad hotel. All shopping malls should be drive-throughs.
The cafe chronicles
I sat in a restaurant that offered vegetarian meals featuring meatless cookies. There was a fly that insisted on visiting my table regularly.
I thought about the schoolboys back in the day that attempted to catch a fly in hand and then pretend to eat it. There is a word, gobemouche [GO-buh-moosh], which refers to someone who swallows flies. It can also apply to someone whose mouth is always open.
Above the door of the eatery was a ziplock bag filled with water and containing a few pennies. It was supposed to act as a homemade fly repellent. The idea is that the water-filled bag created an optical illusion that scared flies away, that light refracted in the water confused the flies or the flies are frightened by their oversized reflections in the bag. None of these hold water. A TV show called "MythBusters" tested the bags and found them of no use in discouraging flies.
The fly landed on my knife. I growled at it and it flew off the handle.
Marsha, Marcia, Marzha
I taught some writing classes. The kids were amazing — nice, polite and smart. In this day and age when the name Portia has given way to Prius, I’m troubled that their names are becoming more difficult for me to get a handle on. The creative names of today’s children require a lot of spelling aloud.
It’s a dog’s life
I received a press release recently about dogs. When www.PoochPerks.com quizzed 1,000 American dog owners who were in relationships, 94 percent said it was important that their dogs liked their significant others, while 71 percent said that if their significant others disliked the dogs, it would cause problems in the relationships. Forty-three percent of respondents would end relationships if their partners couldn’t get along with the dogs. Nearly 80 percent of the dog owners said that their dogs were the first to greet them when they got home. One in five of those polled trusted their dogs more than their partners. Twenty-three percent said that their dogs loved them more than their significant others did, while nearly 20 percent thought that their partners loved their dogs more than them. On average, the respondents said that they would be more devastated if their dogs ran away than if their main squeezes broke up with them.
I’ve often said that every married man ought to have a dog. A harried husband arrives home on days when the entire world seems to be angry with him and his dog meets him at the door. It’s the family’s official greeter. The dog’s enthusiastic greeting says, "Why do you have to go away so often?" and "Promise me that you'll never change. You're perfect just the way you are," without requiring any words.
It gives a man the encouragement needed to become the kind of man that his dog thinks he is.
This week’s travelogue
I spoke at some things in Louisiana. While there, I visited the Tabasco Factory on Avery Island, a lovely spot surrounded by a southern bayou. Tabasco is a product that people use to spice up foods. Try it on your breakfast cereal. It will spice up your morning even if McIlhenny, the Tabasco maker, might not recommend doing it. Avery Island is also home to a 250-acre Jungle Gardens and Bird City, where visitors can see endless egrets, alligators and other local fauna and flora. The Tabasco tour chronicles the business, the people and the region while offering a culinary history lesson with tastings. I left with a lagniappe. My Christmas shopping was done.
Nature notes
After breeding is completed in midsummer, the male mallard undergoes a complete molt, resulting in a dull-colored and basic plumage, termed an eclipse plumage. Mallard drakes in eclipse plumage look like females, but their bills are a light olive green. A hen's bill is orange marked with black. It’s the hen that quacks.
Meeting adjourned
"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted."– Aesop