F16’s Don’t Kill People, 500 Lb. Bombs Kill People

"Mama?" Danny asked from the back of the car, "have we tooken lunch with us?"

Seeing an opportunity, I informed him that "tooken" isn’t a word.

"Well, Mama, how do you know?"

"I’ll tell you what, we’ll go home and look it up in the OED and if it isn’t in there, it isn’t a word."

"What’s the OED?"

"The Oxford English Dictionary. You know those big brown books on the two shelves by the stereo?"

"Yes."
"That’s the OED. If "tooken" is a word it will be in there.

Later:

"Uh oh. Well, isn’t that interesting, tooken is indeed a word, obscure, but a word."

What’s more, he used it correctly, and is now prepared to inform anyone that dare correct him that "tooken" is in the OED.

Ten in the morning is too early for anything, and sitting in the third row for this was just a big old nausea inducing headache fest. Why do the movies have to be so very loud?

Danny liked it fine, but after an hour and a half wanted to leave-he didn’t need to ask me twice.

Why must children’s movies be filled with snide, smart-ass-trying-to-be-hip jokes that are over children’s heads anyway? I didn’t find it funny.

I walked out shaking my head and wondering why they don’t make children’s movies for children anymore…like Dumbo. When was the last time you took a small child to a movie and didn’t have to cringe at the inappropriate jokes? I’m not a prude, but come on, if you’re making a movie about robots, aren’t the special effects enough? Then, because it wasn’t enough to be sexist, they had to make it racist as well. Bah.

Do you know that I felt so positively ill from the visual/audio overkill that I had to come home and crash in a dark room for three hours just to get rid of the headache? 

Now, GET OFF OF MY LAWN!

Damn beatnik kids with their long hair and rock and roll records…

So now the Oxy-Clean guy is dead too? How much more celebrity loss can the world stand?

I’m sure Michael Jackson made some sort of cultural contribution beyond ugly leather jackets with strange little wing-y things on them, and far too many snaps and flaps that served no purpose-but hell if I know what it was. I know that my mother went out and bought one of those stupid jackets, and not satisfied to look like an idiot alone, went out and bought me one in a blazing, bright white (just perfect for a smoker!). I believe it had a sort of rubber trim along with stiffened canvas (to keep the shoulders standing out so straight). And grommets. Someone at the Michael- Jackson- inspired- clothing factory had one hell of a time with the grommet maker.

I’ve always lacked the grasping-pop-culture gene. No, really. One of the most surreal experiences of my life was the day Elvis died. Somehow, the news managed to break while I was walking half a mile to the bakery to buy a loaf of rye bread. The bakery was attached to a Jewish delicatessen-one side was meats, the other bakery. So I get over there, grab my ticket and sit down (they had long benches by the front window) to wait my turn and only then, noticed all these middle aged housewives bawling their eyes out. I mean, from the carrying on, you’d have thought someone important had died. I walked home with my rye bread (eating the heel of the bread, with the baker’s union paper label still stuck to it-how much paper had I consumed off loaves of rye bread before leaving Chicago, I wonder?) and found my mother looking pretty much the same as I’d left her. I mentioned the scene at Kaufman’s to which she shrugged and said, "I never liked him." I gave her the rye bread and her change and went upstairs to listen to the radio tributes pouring in. I still didn’t get it. I still don’t.

When John Lennon was killed, my best friend wanted to drag me off to a vigil and I think I might have upset her by suggesting that holding a vigil for a rather public atheist was kind of stupid.

I made more enemies after Christopher Reeves died by posting something to the effect of, "Geez, it isn’t like he was Orson Welles or something."

The wall-to-wall coverage of Princess Diana’s funeral was kind of nutty as well.

But the oxy-clean dude, that’s just so wrong for him to be dead. Why does God take all the good ones so young? And why couldn’t it have been the Sham-Wow guy instead?

We have a running joke here where I keep telling Danny, "Nice boys stay at home with their mothers."

At four and a half, my son is obsessed with all things Star Wars. I can’t even remember how it came up, but Danny was telling me how he was going to run off and become some evil Dark Side guy.

"Don’t do that Danny." I told him."Look at Darth Vader. If he’d just stayed home with his mama the Sand People never would have killed her, and he wouldn’t have gone all "evil and stuff".

You can tell when kids are frustrated, and think the adults are just stupid nuisances. A very big sigh, and then a pause.

"Mama." He began slowly, "That’s not exactly what happened, and it isn’t what made him a Dark Side guy. Besides, Anakin’s mama isn’t central to the story."

Central. She isn’t central to the story. Where the hell does a four year old get "central" from?

I should probably be pleased he didn’t use integral.

I heard it before seeing it. I’m still pretty sure it was a bull snake, based on the size (that sucker had to be five feet long), and I didn’t get a good enough look at the markings, but it sure did shake like a rattlesnake. We don’t really get them around here, but they do fifty miles to our south. Considering the have fire ants in Nova Scotia now, it is only a matter of time before they do start showing up . We have armadillos in Nebraska now as well.

Anyway, it slithered away quickly, but I"m going to be a bit more cautious going in and out of the mudroom for a couple days.

Bull snakes do a pretty good impersonation of a rattlesnake, but they tend to keep their tails on the ground when they do the rattle thing. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see if the tail was raised or not. Last year, I had a corn snake in the kitchen. A few years before that, a gigantic (over six foot long) bull snake wandered in. I’m much better with snakes when they are curled up in a corner, or at least on the ground, but this one was laying across a bucket of Christmas decorations up hight. Something about hearing rattling above me that makes me cringe.

I hope it at least eats some mice out there.

The Guardian has an article about the push to get South Asians in the UK to eat a lower-fat diet (cooking curries without ghee, for example).

It would be interesting to know how many people in these communities with high incidences of diabetes and cardiovascular disease are really adhering to a non-Western diet. Sure, curries swimming in ghee are fatty, but they become worse if part of a diet that also includes trips to the local chippy.

It would also be interesting to see some numbers on those diseases in the South Asian countries. I can’t help but wonder if such a programme would sound absurd to people struggling to get enough calories to get through the day. Is this perhaps a middle class problem for immigrants doing a bit better )and eating more)in the UK? I don’t know-I’m just speculating.

It takes about a pound of butter to get a cup of clarified butter. Where I live, that costs about $ 2.00 for the butter. I don’t think I could purchase a cup of good quality oil for that. I’m not even sure I could buy Crisco cheaper, and we all know that isn’t exactly a healthy alternative. I don’t know what dairy prices are like in the UK.

Anyway, an interesting thing to think about, though sadly the article didn’t really go into enough detail.

Around ten last evening I was sitting at the computer when I heard a loud noise. I thought it was thunder, but looking up, I saw lights from the road reflecting in the window.

We live down a very rural road-certainly not much traffic along there late at night. I grabbed the binoculars, but they were useless in the dark. I could see about eight vehicles with flashing lights, but I couldn’t tell what they were. I woke my husband.

The commotion seemed to be down by the wildlife area where there is hunting in season-but this isn’t hunting season and it is currently occupied by our neighbour’s grazing cattle (they rent it out in summer).

My husband got up for a drink of water, looked out the window and concluded,

"The cattle probably got loose, and someone hit one." Then, he went back to sleep.

Half an hour later, the flashing lights were gone and as I heard nothing in the news this morning, I’m figuring he’s probably right. Chalk it up to country living, but I don’t think he would have rolled over and went back to sleep if there were eight sets of flashing lights on our street in Boston.

Someone probably hit a cow.

Standing in line at the grocer (where my son often feels inspired to share interesting facts with strangers), Danny decides to inform the cashier, and others in line that:

"Mama has two bleeding ulcers. They stuck a tube down her throat at the hospital and could see them being all bloody. Did you know that you have an esophagus? Everyone does."

Well, that impressed the hell out of the cashier. But anyone that knows Danny knows, there’s more:

Did you know you can get trichinosis from eating raw pork? I don’t eat pork because it comes from pigs and pigs aren’t vegetarian, but if you eat pigs, you should cook them first. I saw a television programme about it. Don’t eat raw pork mister."