Off the Top

You know what I’m sick of? I’m sick of folks telling me not to shop at Wal Mart. Am I to believe that not shopping at that store is supposed to help out the people who work for that store or the vendors who sell to that store? Or is it just supposed to salve my conscience. Well, I’m still not buying it because I at least have some basic understanding of how a free market economy works.

Probably, not many parents enjoy waking up at 1 a.m. to deal with croup. There may be mucus and upchuck to deal with. There are tears to wipe away. Generally the parent is working for an hour to get the child’s breathing back to normal, and so his beauty sleep is in arrears.

Well, last night I got to help B out with a little croup, but I have to admit that I didn’t mind the work. I sure felt sorry for the boy, but it was a special time. It is not often that one can be awake with his son — who is nearly five years old — at 1 a.m., hold him, speak gently to him to calm his spirit, tell him that his dad had the same croup when he was five. It is not often that on can wrap a blanket around him and stand out of doors under a moonless December sky in 30 degree air that is absolutely still and explain why he can see the lights of Omro, Oshkosh, and Winneconne reflected from the clouds, and then hold his son on his lap and rock him to sleep and lay him back down, knowing that he is going to be alright until morning. No, that is tolerably rare.

Tonight, G and I were arguing about whether busted was slang or not. It seems we were both right. In the course of looking up that word, I came across another one — buttinsky. Well, shucks, who would have guessed buttinsky was in the dictionary. “Butt in” + Slavic syllable = light-hearted insult = great fun!

I think I must be the luckiest dad. This morning, G came up with an idea. The family all drew names out of a hat and till Christmas we are required to do secret, random acts of kindness for our assigned family members.

B.B. tells us a funny [true] story. He was checked in at the airport and walking out to the plane when a passenger’s wedding ring got stuck between the rollers on the luggage rack. An airline employee, eager to solve the problem, began asking the passengers, “Does anybody have a knife?”

Your thought for the day: War is not the answer, except when the question is tyranny, slavery, fascism, communism, or terrorism.

Congratulations to L.A. on this beautiful animal.

This summer, I picked up some old books at a flea market, two of which were first editions of The Hardy Boys. Tonight, I was reading The Tower Treasure and noticed something I had not noticed when reading the books as a boy, namely, that the farmers were pulling their wagons with horses. I did not remember that from the original series; still it was not out of place in a book written in 1927. But on a whim I checked a 1987 edition of the same book that I happen to possess and what did I not find? Chapter IV! Moreover, Chet’s “gay-looking speed-wagon” had become “The Queen.” There was no trace of the pointless prank the Hardys’ “chubby friend” played on the local “indolent” farmer, and he wasn’t even so “chubby” anymore. That is right chums, The Hardy Boys series was expurgated, to our loss, sometime during the 1960s!

A quick search revealed that others have figured out the same. Well, I shall enjoy reading this edition, for it surely holds some pleasant surprises.

Your quotation of the day: “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

That’s one of the lamest things I’ve ever heard. I had to say “I’m sorry” to three or four people yesterday. Do I love those people? Of course I do! Yet I believe the only way I could have avoided that sorriness is to have avoided contact or refrained from real relationships with those folks. What a joke.

D.G. writes:

The UN continues to poke its nose into the internet’s business:http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6131394.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode

There are some wonderful statements in that zdnet article:

“This new society leaves people isolated, marginalized…”

“Linguistic diversity should be ‘the key principle of Internet governance…’”

“Hamid Shahriari, part of Iran’s delegation to the U.N.’s Internet Governance Forum, blamed Microsoft for having software that does ‘not work hardly on my own languages.’”

And now you will be havening to be enjoying to read my opinion: It may or may not be a good idea to have multi-lingual domain names; that’s not for me to decide. If, however, those are the only reasons we can come up with, then it’s not a good idea.