Beehive

What's with all the dreadlock beehive hairdo's lately?

Haven't they heard about the dreadlock beehive wearing person (a friend knew her! Or him!) who kept feeling ill and sick and couldn't find the reason and then died from massive black widow spider bites because a black widow was living in their dreadlock beehive and kept biting them and then laid eggs and they hatched?

Huh? Well?

How to hammer in a long stick

1. Find a stick and a hammer. Sledgehammer is good.
2. Cut off end of stick at an angle, with coping saw. Pointy stick goes into ground more easily.
3. Find good place to hammer in stick.
4. The spot will be outside, of course, since that's where the best ground is. But the stick is long so you need a ladder, which is in the cellar which is so far away, so you get the second-best thing:
5. Find a 14-year-old girl.
6. Talk her into climbing onto your shoulders and hammering in the stick.
7. She'll protest that she's too heavy for you. Just tell her, no you're not. You're lithe as a young doe.
8. She'll say she doesn't want to break your back. Assure her this is not a risk. It's just picking up the heavy weights, the getting up part, that's getting harder. The getting up joints - knees, back - aren't getting any younger. But the standing stuff is still fine, seriously. Sit down on the steps, make her climb onto your shoulders. Think about the guy, Greek maybe, or Roman, one of those pantheon types, who lifted the cow every day from when it was a little calf. He could still lift it when it was full-grown. Full-grown cow. Strong guy. Interesting workout program. You've been lifting this girl onto your shoulders most days since she was a baby so you still can. Keep this analogy to yourself.
9. Getting up, of course, will be a problem. Hang onto the fence to help yourself stand up. Use the stick if necessary. Hanging onto the fence with a sledgehammer in your hand won't be easy, but it's still better than letting her hold it while you try to get up with her on your shoulders, cause she could accidentally knock you with it. This way she has both hands free to grasp your head or whatever.
10. Okay, now you're up. Put stick in right place and give her the sledgehammer.
11. Yes, it's heavy honey. Sledgehammers are supposed to be heavy. It's in their nature.
12. Stand there holding stick while she hammers it in. Isn't this more interesting than just climbing up onto a ladder and doing it yourself? She's slender but strong, isn't she. Hard rower's legs grasp the base of your skull where the stubble is. What would a sledgehammer strike feel like? It would probably be a glancing blow, wouldn't it, not a straight-on crushing blow the archeologists find centuries later and say was the result of a battle, or a tribal conflict or a ritual killing, sacrifice maybe. It would be a glancing blow, but still, ouch. Head injuries bleed so much, and this would certainly break the skin, shift some scalp an inch, expose a bit of skull, maybe a hairline fracture, lucky to get away without a concussion.
13. Enough hammering already. If the stick is still wiggly, hammer a small metal post next to it and tie them together good for stability.
14. Stretch cord between stick and fence, hang colored glass candleholders (protect votive candles from wind, decorative function).
15. You're ready for your barbecue.
16. As added bonus, next day your wife tells you the girl told her, "dad is so strong!"
    Posted at 07:23 AM | Comments (3)

It's a grand old flag

Man desecrates U.S. flag.

Hello Princess

"A princess is really coming to visit?"
"Mm hmm."
"A real princess?"
"Yes, honey."
"This isn't just another story you're telling me?"
"No."
"..." [dumbstruck]

When you're a six-year-old girl, princesses are serious business.

Friends came to visit on Saturday. He's Austrian, she's Indonesian. He's an anthropologist, she's a geologist. She also has an Indonesian title that translates as "princess".

I spent the day shopping and getting stuff ready for the barbecue. I have a phobia of running out of charcoal or lighter fluid, so I bought more, then it turned out I stocked up at the end of last barbecue season, so now I have tons of charcoal and lighter fluid.

My wife did a lot of cleaning and even weeded. "Take it easy," I said. "You act like royalty's coming to visit." She just looked at me.

It was a really nice visit. It's always nice when intelligent, interesting people come over.

And it was funny to watch our youngest daughter. Like me, she's often quiet around new people, but this time she was completely flabberghasted. She couldn't take her eyes off the "Princess", who we will call N.

After dinner, we sat around the table on our terrace while my wife asked our guests questions. She's good at that, so I often let her do it. Our daughter whispered to me that she'd like to sit in the Princess's lap, but was too shy to ask. So I asked for her.

"Of course," N. said.

So our daughter sat in her lap for a while, too shy to say a word. Gradually, though she relaxed. "Are you really a real princess?" she asked. N. said yes.

Our daughter eventually crawled back out of N.'s lap, took her hand and dragged her into the house for a tour.

Later, N. told us our daughter didn't shut up the entire time. She showed her her collection of "Princess" magazines, which for those of you who don't have little girls handy are Disney publications with Cinderella, Belle, Pocahontas, Arielle, Snow White and Mulan in each issue, and free gifts tacked on to each cover - plastic tiaras, jewelry or make up usually.

She showed N. her Barbie dolls, especially her Pocahontas and Arielle ones. She showed her her fancy dresses and discussed Shakira with her, and demonstrated her Shakira CD.

She waved when they left. It was late when she went to bed, so I didn't read her a story, but I had to tell her one about a princess visiting a little girl. They went for a hot air balloon ride, in the story.

"That was the best day of my whole life, when N. visited us," she told me the next day.

Magical realism

I wrote a story once about a guy whose friend gets beat up and ends up in the hospital. The beat-up friend got smaller in each rewrite until finally he was tiny in the middle of the bed, skin yellow with bruises, hooked up to various monitors and life-support systems.

Then my first daughter was born three months premature. When I first visited her in the hospital, she was tiny, yellow with jaundice and hooked up to a respirator, monitors and had a feeding tube down her nose.

I wrote a story about a guy who was confused and ended up in the back seat of a taxi with a really old Japanese woman who leaned over onto his shoulder as the taxi went around a corner and he realized she had died. The story ended with him sitting there, riding and riding, her hair occaisionally tickling his face in the breeze.

The next day as I walked to the hospital to visit my daughter I passed an old lady who had died in the street. She just fell over. People stood around her looking, but not in a big hurry. A little blood came out her nose.

I was, at that time, working on a story about a guy who was estranged from his wife and whose daughter was dying of cancer. He wandered onto the set of a movie about Bigfoot.

I stopped writing fiction at that point. I only just started up again recently. I'm having a hell of a time getting going.

Hips

Standing around by some rose bushes, it occurred to me that I was mortal. Am mortal? So I looked really closely at the rose hips. I haven't been looking at rose hips closely enough lately.

In a dream, someone showed me a picture of a scientist-looking guy (short regular haircut, beard, glasses) and told me he was a renegade phytobiologist. Well, not "phytobiologist", but something that sounds a lot like it in a dream. And not "renegade" but something close.

Driving part way around a traffic circle on my way to work this morning, CD player tuned to Shakira's Spanish songs, I wondered how a hermit crab knows when to leave his old shell for a new one. Does it just get tight in there, or is there a psychological component, like claustrophobia? And in between shells, when he's running around naked, does he just feel vulnerable, or does he feel naked in a good way, like, "hell yeah, I'm naked, this rocks!"?

Muy muy lejos

"Not this!"
"But honey!"
"Not this. What is this?"
"This is a bonus track! This is not just Sepultura, this is Sepultura doing Mongoloid by the Ramones!!!"
"Shakira!"
"Gah, we listen to her every morning on the way to daycare."
"Shakira! The Spanish songs!"
"Okay."
"No quiero dejarlo todo a lazar
Entiendo
Que he comenzado a estorbar
Pronto estaré de ti
Muy muy lejos"

Control

They remodeled the gym. All the machines for spinning flywheels and driving up your heart rate - the rowing machines, the stair machines, the cross trainer machines and the stationary bicycles - are way upstairs now (and no elevator!). The good part is they have two televisions, one on the left side, one on the right. So now I can watch TV when I get my cardio workout.

Or I could, if I could figure out the remote control mechanism.

Late Sunday night my wife and I were at the gym. My wife was a floor lower down in an odd-looking contraption she swears works. I went upstairs. The room was empty but for a hot blonde in cutting edge workout wear pedaling away in front of the left-hand television. There was a movie on. You have a TV, you know which one I'm talking about. That black guy from Wild Wild West was dragging an alien across the desert and encountered a bunch of Winnebagos.

I stared at my dark television set for a while as I did the cross trainer thing. Then I got up enough courage to try to turn on my set. I figured I'd watch the same thing, so the soundtracks didn't clash. But no remote control.

"It's over here," she said. "There's only one for both TVs."

I thanked her, pointed it at my set and promptly turned hers off.

"Sorry," I said. Did I say it was dark in the room? She hadn't turned the lights on. Without the television, I couldn't even read the buttons on the remote control.

The view out the window was interesting - the local cemetery. Most fitness clubs I've worked out in had views of cemeteries for some reason. One was next door to a mortuary.

I finally surrendered the device to her. She was kind enough to turn on my set for me just in time to see an alien vivisection.

Boy was it pissed off!

Dress code

"Aren't you hot in a suit?"
"Yes."
"Why do you wear a suit if it's hot?"
"It's required. I have to wear a suit at my job."
"You should go to daycare. We can wear whatever we want!"
"I'll think about it."

Reqiuem Requiem

What killed classical music?

Do not adjust your mind set

She doesn't have a TV at the moment.

[Via eeksy-peeksy]

Pest and cholera

She got to pick out her own clothes this morning, so she's wearing a party dress. It's diaphanous and a little short on her because she's finally growing and the wind whips it around her knees. She wants to feed ducks. She knows we have two old rolls no one will eat.

So we walk to the bridge. It's the wrong time of day; I'm still disoriented from lunch and the light makes everything look dangerous and I have to squint and the streets are empty. The wind whips her dress around her knees and her long hair is ratty-looking from the wind, with several large clumps of glitter from a cosmetic set someone gave her sometime. Barely six and already I can't keep track of her cosmetics.

No ducks are in the water. It's too hot. Wind blows green summer scum upstream. She looks for a space in the railing without any spiderwebs, but between each pair of bars there is another web dotted with mosquitos and gnats and small lacy-winged things. "Why are there so many spiders here?" she asks. I tell her I guess it's a good place to catch little bugs on account of the prevailing wind.

She leans her scooter against the railing, it falls down. I mess with it for a while getting it into a position where it will lean there without falling over, until finally leaving it lying there on the sidewalk. She didn't want to come by bike. She's postponing that decision. Actually, it's like this. This morning she decided not to try to learn. I understand her perfectly. It's not a choice between riding a bike and not riding. Like any real choice, it's a choice between two anxiety-producing alternatives. In German this is called a choice between "Pest und Cholera" - between the plague and cholera.

In this case, the alternatives are not being able to ride a bike, and learning to ride one, one humiliating, the other scary and painful.

Like her dad, she usually opts for the status quo, no matter how absurd in the long run, although she can surprise you.

We find some clunky black ducks with white heads and red on them in the shade on the bank under the bridge and throw them bits of stale roll. She has to stand on her tiptoes to toss them over the railing.

After this we spend some time at the playground. I get her going good on the merry-go-round and sit in the shade to look at the Sunday paper. She wants to go on the seesaw, so I stop the merry-go-round and do the seesaw with her, with her at the end of her side and me up near the fulcrum on my side. After this she swings for a while, then I somehow talk her into going home.

PS to the naked guy who lives between my house and the gym: Get some curtains, man

So I painted the upstairs hallway today and part of the stairwell going down. Taking a break out on the patio with my wife and my eldest daughter, who has been ill and a little odd lately, prone to saying things like "your head doesn't go with the rest of your body. I don't know exactly why, it just doesn't, somehow," I had a drink of water and tried out my painting joke on them.

"When I was a boy dreaming of living in Europe and painting, I somehow imagined it differently," I said.

They looked at me kindly.

"I have it!" my daughter said. "It's not as hairy as the rest of your body!"

Models

Whereas Degas painted the dancing girls, I get to paint a hallway yellow this weekend; a hallway and a stairwell and I can't say I expect to feel any less satisfaction than he probably did. I enjoy painting.

My daughter who is sick woke me up at about three this morning because mosquitos bit her 20 times the previous night and I told her to wake me up next time she heard them and I'd swat them for her. I couldn't find the mosquito, though, although I heard it once as it flew past my head, laughing a mosquito's high-pitched laugh. So I swatted a fly sleeping on the ceiling. It may have had ties to *l-Qua*da. It may have sought to acquire uranium in Africa.

You never know about flies.

Then I went back to bed, glad I didn't have to hunt burglars.

Cause I hunted burglars the night before last. It was the typical scenario - middle of the night, windy. You hear a burglar noise and walk through the house doing kung fu moves as you round corners and pass through doorways, all the while telling yourself, "It's only the wind" and recalling simultaneously that's what people tell each other in horror movies just before the monster/guy in the hockey mask/Texan with the chainsaw gets them. You find nothing, then go back to bed.

Except I found the front door unlocked. I probably forgot to lock it, which is out of character for me, a compulsive door-locker (thanks mom).

I went back to bed and had a bad dream about getting stuck in a car outside an inn that was also a church and a cemetary, throwing the car into reverse although visibility was bad and knocking over a stone structure that had some religious and/or historical significance, and got caught by the innkeeper before I could get away.

Then I woke up, made coffee and realized the thing I had knocked over had the same emotional charge, for me, as our old coffee maker, which leaked. My wife replaced it the same day, although I didn't tell her anything about that.

Talk about mental telepathy.

More field

Sunflowers now, field-wise, by the field, field after field of heavy yellow noggins turned toward the sun or, at sunset, turning back to where it will come back up in the morning; enough to make you want to go on an absinthe binge, box your ear and send it to a hooker, shoot yourself in the heart with a crow gun.

Makeovers

I could use a little of this.

Poetry

When a child asks you to give her a word so she can come up with other words that rhyme, do you tell her "Orange"? Or just think "Orange" and say "Moon"?

You are handsome today

We have a new gardener at work. A tall, young, muscular Filipino guy, model handsome. Near-sighted, too, perhaps, because this morning he told me I was handsome.

"You are handsome today!" he said.

"Gee, thanks," I said. (See, I wasn't tongue-tied this time because another guy told me the same thing last week and I was tongue-tied and to avoid the embarrassment in the future should it happen again I prepared a snappy comeback and lo-and-behold it came in handy.)

But he wasn't finished. "You're handsome every day!" he said.

"Dress code," I said. I did what I always do in unusual situations, smiled a shit-eating grin, and went into the office thinking about what had just happened. Is the guy near-sighted? Am I his type? Is he just being nice (probably)? Is this just a cheap way to talk about my good looks on my blog (likely)?

I ought to post a picture my youngest daughter took of me recently. My face looks swollen and half paralyzed. It's hilarious.

What was my point? I forget.

On an unrelated note, this sex book I was reading a couple weeks ago mentioned that the prostate was the male G-spot. I'm thinking if you want to try that out on your lover, you may want to warn him first. And that reminds me that I'm overdue for a prostate exam. Sorry, you're not reading this at lunch I hope. My urologist is an Ireland fan and thinks I'm Irish and always tells me about his last trip over, (SNAP! go the rubber gloves) and drinking Kilkenny beer because Guinness (SQUIRT goes the lube) is too dark for him.

Did you know the prostate is the only "heart-shaped" organ in the human body? I always forget to post that on Valentine's day.

Free mason

My in-laws live on the side of a mountain so their property slants at about 45 degrees.

They are getting old and decided they need steps in the backyard so my father-in-law and I did a little bonding this weekend. He mixed concrete and carried it, two buckets at a time, up two flights of stairs to where I attempted to piece cobblestones into stairs. He also carried buckets of sand when I needed them.

They turned out okay. Not great, but okay. I don't know where they got the idea that I could do that kind of work.

I just did them the way I do everything else in my life - just sort of figure it out as I go along. Although they came out level left to right, they slant down a little too much from back to front (that would be dangerous if they get icy in winter), so I'll have to take a mallet and knock them into position later (they're mostly set in sand except for the front row on each step).

I also worked out Sunday morning, so I'm sore in a good way.

Self-help

Among my few character flaws is a certain irresistable, cyclical attraction to self-help books. Every now and then I buy a few, read them, believe them whole-heartedly, fail to implement them and, finally, forget them. Which is just as well because, face it, people never change, do we?

I mean, you can change what you do, but not who you are, deep down. And it's who I am, deep down, that really truly bugs me, you know.

Oh, before I forget, to the small lady on the hot, crowded subway with her head stuck in some guy's armpit: whew, I know; I apologize; but I am allergic to every deodorant I've found so far, they make my armpits itch horribly so I can't use them. Sorry!

And this one self-help book -- which I'm liking so far since it admits you can't change another person or a relationship, just yourself, assuming that is that you can change yourself which you of course can't (see above), but which I won't name here as it's a bit academic in parts and also, I haven't finished it yet so I won't mention it yet but I promise to later if it works, which I doubt -- mentioned sexual fantasies, and what they can, sometimes, tell about you.

And I asked myself, have I ever really had a sexual fantasy? Normally, I wouldn't ask myself that but traffic was fairly light on the freeway and now that they've installed these computerized spy cameras everywhere here that photograph your license plates and calculate your average speed people have been going the speed limit here, which is a real miracle in Austria so it seemed safe to pursue the line of thought.

Have I? Fantasies? Day-dreams?

No. I've never had a sexual fantasy, not once in my life. Before I met my wife, I might have seen a woman walking down the sidewalk and thought, "gosh, she's really fucking hot!" But that's not a fantasy.

My visual imagination really sucks, maybe that's part of it. And, in writing, I'm not very good at coming up with a plot, either. Maybe it's some deficiency hardwired into my brain. So I decided to try to have a sexual fantasy right there, going 130 KpH on the freeway.

Do I have any fetishes? Let's see. Art supplies. I really, really like art supplies. So it'll be at an art supply store. I'm working there, late at night. It's an all-night art supply store, you see.

My co-worker is a woman from Dublin, pale skin, sexy Irish accent, smart as hell, glasses. Black hair. Bangs - hell, it's my fantasy, she has bangs. Business is slow. "Let's go into the back room and see if there's any, uh, more coffee in the Thermos," I say. "That'd be grand," she says.

Since this is a fantasy, another woman shows up. We're all there in the back room - the women are already naked - and the bell over the front door rings. Someone has come in.

"Are ye thick? Go get it," says the Irish woman. "Gobshite," says the other one. I'd forgotten how sharp-tongued they can be.

So I do. They carry on without me. I hear the door lock as I go out front.

But, being my fantasy, it's Charlize Theron. Wearing a swarm of bees. She looks around for Conte crayons in a specific shade of grey. I help her look. We go up and down the rows. She emits a gentle breeze and humming sound as the bees fan their wings to maintain a constant temperature.

We don't appear to have the shade of grey Conte crayon she's looking for in stock so she leaves.

I sit at the cash register for the rest of the night, freezing flies with propellant sprayed from an aerosol lens-cleaner can held upside-down, lining them up along the edge of the counter and watching them thaw out, shake their heads groggily and then fly off unsteadily, one after the next, but no more customers come in all night.

Liberal candidate

So is Howard Dean the guy? Or is this going to be like McGovern in 1972? Or worse?

Would it help Dean if I donated my $14 million in Blogshares money to his campaign?

I was talking to a nice guy a while back. It turned out we had both gotten into fistfights in junior high, with Nixon supporters.

Is this for real?

Vote manipulation?

The end of the world as we know it

Or, 16,000 liberals and one Nazi.

Met my wife at Schloss Schönbrunn yesterday for our first rock concert in, sigh, years.

Actually, met her at the subway station in front of the palace. She was almost late on time, so I only had to amble around aimlessly in circles like, 20 minutes to people watch as I waited for her.

It's a charming venue for a rock concert. If you click that link, there's an image of the palace on the splash page - the stage was right in the center there where those pathways meet, in front of the large statuary.

We were an hour or so early and she didn't feel like waiting around amongst all the kids (actually the crowd was a real mix of kids and people our age) (I can't say "wait in line" because people don't stand in line in Austria, they sort of crowd around whatever it is they want - entrance, airline terminal, intersection) and so we went looking for a restaurant, where we had a drink and ate something as we waited.

The crowd was mellow, and a real mix of ages, which is what you get when a 20-year-old college band comes to town. 16,000 educated liberals. Well, and one Nazi - this old guy, about 65 or 70, in a sports coat and slacks and shiny sort of huarache-type sandals with a neo-Nazi pamphlet sticking out of his pocket. He must have wandered in somehow by accident. He left during the opening act. I understand how he must have felt, they weren't very good.

"Jesus, €25 for a tee-shirt?" one of us said as we looked at the swag. I felt as if we were back in the circus. We got refreshments instead. I got a beer, even though I wasn't really thirsty for a beer, simply because I enjoy being able to buy beer at a concert. I can't remember if they didn't sell beer at concerts in the United States, or if I was just too young to buy it back in my concert-going days.

I doubt they sold it, though.

We stood around observing the grey ponytails on all the guys my age, and how most of the kids had expensive hair-stylist looks. My wife observed how all the "mothers", her word for the forty-something women, wore denim jackets, and only them. Them and a few of their stifled, well-behaved non-rebellious daughters. She glared at her own jacket. "Swear to God, I'm burning this as soon as we get home."

We discussed how difficult it must be for adolescents to rebel nowadays and how much the opening band sucked. I asked my wife whether she thought the symbols tattooed on a young woman's lower back were Chinese or Kanji, and how far down they went. "I don't believe it, you have me looking at other women's asses," she said.

When the main act started, I was dismayed at my lack of passion, although I did manage to burn my fingers holding a lighter up during one slow song (along with 16,000 other people), when the metal fittings on the lighter heated up. I didn't need to holler myself hoarse, there were kids around to do that.

It was a beautiful night, bright halfmoon over the palace, cool breeze after a hot day. I almost fell asleep driving home afterwards.

At the circus

One day it was just there, on the field outside town where the Gypsies camp when they pass through. The circus. Circus Barelli, billing itself as Germany's second-largest circus (after the Bundestag?).

(By the way, I highly recommend visiting their site!!!)

It is a large circus, with many trucks and trailers. The tent is colorful and 25 meters tall. Impossible for a strong-willed six-year-old to miss, in other words.

So we went. One rainy night we went. Yes, as a special treat, we went after our daughter's normal bed time. She was keen on that. She couldn't believe her luck. We had free tickets. The circus, you see, hands out free tickets when they arrive in town.

Well, free. "Free" tickets. Free, depends what you mean by free. Free as in, free for one adult. First of all, the kid pays full fare. Still, we get in free! Yeah, cotton candy / fairy floss and so on will cost you etc. But what the hell, how often does the circus come to town?

Well, free. They were called free tickets, said right on there, "Freikarten" but that means, in circusspeak, ten Euro off. Says right there on their website, which you absolutely really should visit if only for the little ringmaster cursor chaser.

"You want HOW MUCH?" I asked the lady at the window selling tickets, who happened to be the circus boss too. She just ignored me and waited for me to pay. She'd obviously done this frequently in the past.

"Just pay the lady, honey."

"You know how fucking much she wants? Free tickets, pah."

So we went in. Big tent. Very cool.

"Daddy, can I have a..." "NO! You know what this cost me already? No you can't have any peanuts, cotton candy or..."

"...a flashing green disco light?"

"No flashing green disco light."

Big circus. They had a live band. My daughter and I discussed where we'd put the various areas - kitchen, bedroom, living room - if we lived in a circus tent year round.

Various animals came out and did things. One neurotic long-horned bull tried to gore the four shapely dancing girls wearing red sequin bikinis and red harem pants slit ankle-to-waist with sequined hairornaments and strings of pearls every time it circled the ring, but they were used to it and shimmied out of the way each time it passed.

A man stood in the center of the ring and cracked a whip at the animals to make them behave. There was much cracking of whips in general. Eh, German circus.

A very tightly packed woman - as if a large woman had been packed under high pressure into a medium sized woman - with blonde hair pulled back tightly into a braid, the largest false eyelashes I've ever seen - and many, many sequins rode two horses around, one at a time. Cracking of whips. In general, though, the animals were well-treated and looked very healthy and happy.

A clown picked people out of the audience for humiliation, triggering my lifelong fear of being picked out of the audience by a clown, but I was spared.

The Eastern European acrobats were pretty good. A man jumped off a low tower onto a seesaw, shooting a young dishwater blonde woman with good abdominal definition in a blue top and very short blue hotpants into the air, where she did twists and flips and rolls before landing on his shoulders.

Later they did the Wheel of Death, which was impressive. The woman wore a more flattering red sequin bikini this time.

Almost forgot the contortionist. She had a poetic act. It was like a traditional circus trying to do Cirque du Soleil or however that is spelled. Wait, I'll do a google search... Good guess, I got it right. She was in a tight outfit, white with silver I believe, climbing around a silver hula hoop that was raised fifteen meters into the air. Swinging and stuff.

Horses and cows ran around. In the middle, they had a 20 minute break for the kids to pet the animals. Only €5 per person. The ringmaster announced it as long as he had to for every kid to want to go do it.

"You go with the kid, I'll wait here," I said.

I mean, really. Fifteen goddamned Euro to touch a stinky circus animal!

I had no idea camel hair was that coarse. And the miniature ponies have velvety snouts. Duh, like all horses. And they look a lot fatter up close.

More of the same in the second half.

Walked back to the car in the rain with a sleepy child on my shoulders, feeling a little like an elephant with an ostrich feather headdress had pinned me over a gaily-painted barrel and picked my pocket as clowns stole my watch. Swearing no more fucking circuses.

Until the next circus comes to town, at least.

Recipe for my wife's world-famous Kirschkuchen

I remember what it was I'd wanted to post yesterday. An ethnologist told me that during a trip to Papua New Guinea he'd asked a tribesman the name of his mother-in-law. The shocked man warned him in a whisper never to ask anyone the name of his mother-in-law. "You could be killed!" he said. Mothers-in-law are taboo there, being in charge of black magic as they are, and are never referred to by name.

How primitive.

On a completely unrelated note, during a recent trip to a wine-growing region here, we saw a stand selling things to eat, including pastries, and long strips of what looked like fried dough, about two inches wide and a foot-and-a-half long and sort of concave. Or convex, depending on which side you're examining them from, very thin dough. We asked what they were. "Mother-in-law tongues," we were told. Made by rolling some sort of dough out very thin - it looked like pastry dough - and frying it on a griddle.

How quaint.

Anyway. Brian asked for my wife's Kirschkuchen recipe.

My Wife's Now-World-famous Kirschkuchen

Disclaimer
Being intellectuals, you can do the conversions yourselves, as necessary
Also, THIS WORKS WITH PITTED PIE CHERRIES, not regular cherries.

Ingredients:

• 250 g real butter not margarine
  
• 250 g sugar
  
• 4 eggs
  
• 400 g all-purpose flour
  
• 16 g baking powder, my wife thinks

Instructions

• Butter and eggs must be at room temperature
  
• Mix butter and sugar with mixer
  
• Don't forget to preheat oven to 190 degrees C.
  
• One at a time, add eggs to mixture, mixing with mixer, then add next egg, mix, etc.
  
• Mix flour and baking powder, then stir into butter-egg-sugar mixture
  
• You need a form, or baking pan or something, shallow and large enough for the Kuchen. We use the oven tray, greased (buttered) and thinly floured. Maybe a non-stick item would also work, but no promises.
  
• Spread dough on pan, put cherries on top (should be enough cherries to cover it). Sprinkle this with cinnamon and powdered sugar.
  
• Bake for one hour at 190 degrees C, or until it looks like a Kirschkuchen; golden brown etc. You can do the stick-something-in-and-if-no-dough-sticks-to-it-it's-done test. My wife uses a knitting needle, my mother used a knife but she never made Kirschkuchen.
  
• Consume.

Food for thought

They say fish is a brain food, but I had fish last night and cannot remember what it was that I wanted to say here. Maybe it was the wrong kind of fish.

I remember hearing about cowboys shaking out their boots before putting them on in case anything venomous had crawled inside during the night, like real estate developers. After showers lately, I shake out my towel before using it, and inspect it closely for eight-legged friends.

"Mommy, there's a wet naked man shaking spiders off a towel out on his porch!"

Weather has cooled down here. Today is showery, overcast and cool. Very pleasant. I had muesli for breakfast.

What the hell was that story.

You know how someone from Berlin is called a Berliner in German? And someone from Hamburg is called a Hamburger? The German name for Vienna is Wien, and there's a lifestyle magazine here called "Wiener". When I was first living here a long time ago, and moved back to the States, I nearly subscribed just to have something to maintain the connection, until I imagined the mail carrier's face delivering the post.

I baked strawberry-rhubarb cobbler recently and it was good. My wife has done a lot with pie cherries lately, since all the cherries on our youngest child's tree ripened at the same time this year. Kirschkuchen. Cherry marmalade. More Kirschkuchen. "Anyone want some more Kirschkuchen?" "No thanks, mom."

What is with Blogshares anyway? My portfolio is over $12 million now. What does one do with it at this juncture? What's the point?

Catalpa

Is it common for catalpa trees to lose their leaves in the summertime? Mine's done it for the past two or three years - at some point they just all wilt, dry up and fall off. One year they never came back, the next I watered more and they did. Watering more seems to help, but only partially. This year they're wilting and falling off again. I've increased watering even more, but it's lost about half it's leaves so far. There's been no digging near the tree, so it's not root damage, although it did suffer some bark damage a couple years ago from cold winter weather. It's standing in a windy spot.

C18H20O2

Female 1: Blah blah blah blah blah.
Female 2: Oh yeah? Same to you and more of it. Blah blah blah.
Female 1: You're so cruel. Blah blah blah.
Female 2: What do you think you are? Blah blah blah.
Female 1: Yeah but not like you blah blah blah.
Female 2: Who do you think I inherited it from? Blah blah blah.
Male: [Thinking: "A kid who had diarrhea at swim class would probably be nicknamed The Squid".]
Female 1: Blah blah blah.
Female 2: Blah blah blah!!! [Slams door]
Female 1: You're her father, what do you think?
Male: Eh, you don't want to know.