Daily Ambivalence - waxing nose hair

My daughter went to school for a year to be an esthetician.

She has a double-barreled wax melter to prove that she went to school for a year. When you're an esthetician you need a double-barreled wax melter because different procedures require that different levels of pain be inflicted.

Back in medieval times people who performed similar types of procedures worked in dungeons and used leather straps, iron spikes, and hot pokers. The sounds of screaming have remained the same.

Scoreboards

Scoreboards are like lamposts in a movie theater parking lot. A reality check of sorts after you've been lost inside a fantasy.

Check the score or consider a reflection of yourself in your car window as you jiggle a set of keys. There you are, like it or not.

I suppose though that in today's world, especially for an American, it is easier to fudge the numbers.

In centuries' past, a scoreboard was nothing more fancy than spilt blood and a lifeless opponent sprawled on the ground. Scoreboards were graves without headstones and names that faded in memory, even among family.

These days I can stand in any parking lot, the light from the lampost above highlighting some of my features and casting others in shadow, and it isn't that hard to stay lost in the fantasy. Am I ahead or behind, home or away?

Blissful ignorance I guess, right?

Daily Ambivalence - Surfin' USA

I have this recurring dream about the Frankenstein monster on a surfboard riding a wave in some ocean outside Des Moines, Iowa. This is ridiculous for many reasons. For one, the Frankenstein monster can barely walk a straight line on a level floor. Getting air off an a-frame? I don't think so.

And now that I think about it, another factor contributing to the ridiculous nature of my dream is the pronounced lack of ocean in Iowa.

My son broke his humerus bone

So here's how smart I am.

My youngest son has now broken his right arm three times. The first two times were while he was jumping on the trampoline in our backyard. We got rid of our trampoline.

Someone, however, recently invented what we in Utah call a bounce house. I'm not sure what they're called elsewhere.

A bounce house, if you don't have one near you, is a big warehouse packed full of giant blow up slides and bouncing cages and I don't know what else.

And when I say I don't know what else, I'm being serious. In our local bounce house I've never actually been inside the bounce house proper.

Our bounce house has a "no way am I participating in this" area. Usually for parents. That's where I go. Not because I am afraid of breaking my humerus, but because the smell of that many teenage kids in an enclosed place, all of them sweating like . . . well, teenage kids, is really something better to write about than experience.

Even in the sitting area. Wow.

Daily Ambivalence - shouting fire in a crowded theatre

I think shouting fire in a crowded theatre is fine if there is a fire in the theatre.

Also, if everyone in the theatre has gathered to witness an execution by firing squad, they are probably expecting someone to shout fire.


I even feel it is fine to shout fire in a crowded theatre and start a panic if the people in the theatre are attending a Dictators for Starvation conference or a Hitlers Anonymous meeting.

Other than that, shouting fire in a crowded theatre is wrong and I should probably stop doing it.

Shouting fire in a crowded theatre . . . eh.

Daily Ambivalence - sympathetic weight gain in conjunction with a pregnancy

Some people think a man who blames his weight gain on a pregnant spouse is just making excuses. Not true.

I've gained some weight lately and my spouse hasn't been pregnant in over ten years. You would think that should count as evidence against my argument, but hold on - I do know people who are pregnant.

I have a sneaking suspicion that medical science won't back me up on this, but that is because more and more doctors nowadays are women, who by their nature are not sympathetic to the idea of sympathetic weight gain among men. I can hear them now, making unfair comparisons and pointing instead to a lack of exercise and bad eating habits as opposed to a surprise guest taking up residence in their uterus. This is patently unfair because a man doesn't have a uterus.

Isn't it obvious that a middle-aged man can't help it when weight gain rears its ugly head? You're just bound to know someone who's pregnant.

I could become a hermit, I suppose, live in the mountains. The problem is, I am deathly afraid of ticks.

Sympathetic weight gain in conjunction with a pregnancy . . . eh.

Daily Ambivalence - sticks with a ridged ball on one end that you dip in honey

Lots of times when you see honey displayed, like in conjunction with a flavored oat cereal or even  the earthenware pots favored by Winnie the Pooh, you will also see somewhere in the background a stick with a funny ball on one end. The ball part of the stick is apparently used to dip into the honey and then hold over something you wish to drizzle with yellow foodstuff.

I, uh . . . what?

I'm going to make up a story about the guy who invented what I am going to term - the honey stick.

One day, Mr. Charles Darwin was reading the funny papers over breakfast. His house servant came out of the kitchen with a bowl of honey for Mr. Charles Darwin's toast, but this was in the days before the spoon, knife, or fork had been invented. It was even before the days of chopsticks. Mr. Charles Darwin couldn't figure out a good way of transferring the honey from the bowl to his toast, so he ate the toast plain. This sent him into a flying rage and he killed the last ten dodo birds left in the world.

Daily Ambivalence - fruit smoothies

Sometimes I like a fruit smoothie for breakfast. 

The miracle of a fruit smoothie is that you don't need to add processed sugar, corn syrup, Girl Scout cookies, or even crack cocaine to make it good.

You just add fruit and stuff.

You know - strawberries and blueberries and peaches and pineapples and bananas and raspberries. Fruit.

The stuff you add can be stuff like yogurt or wheatgerm or hemp seeds or flax seed or oatmeal or spinach. You know, gross stuff that needs to be camouflaged.

Fruit smoothies are just plain awesome.

Daily Ambivalence - Old Yeller

The other day my son asked me what a cliche was.

I think a statement that a person might make that is kind of like a cliche is "I cried at the end of Old Yeller."

Names are key to understanding the significance of the movie Old Yeller. Sure the movie was set in the American West during a time when the well-educated people of the day held 10, 20, and 30 year reunions after graduating from 4th grade, but Yeller is not a proper abbreviation for the word Yellow. Look at it. It's not even an abbreviation. It has the same number of letters.

Fess Parker. I approve of that name.

Daily Ambivialence - people who are called "the talent"

If Britney Spears, a rabbi, a priest, and I were in an airplane that was about to crash and there was only one parachute between us, Britney Spears would be the one that everybody referred to as "the talent."

My wife and daughter went to a Britney Spears concert a few years ago and from what they told me, Britney Spears actually is very talented.

What I don't like is that Britney Spears seems to think she is good enough to strong arm her way into a priest and rabbi joke.

Perfect Movie Scenes - Blade Runner

Such a cool looking movie. Blade Runner was based off one of my all-time favorite books, a little somethin somethin called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

This is just my opinion, and I'm sure there are plenty of people who would say the title is too long, but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADOES) is possibly the greatest book title of all time. Some of the other competing titles? Much Ado about Nothing, To Kill a Mockingbird, Fahrenheit 451, and how about another Phillip K. Dick book Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said.

It isn't make-up. He actually
looked like that.

DADOES was definitely too long a title for the semi-literate crowd of Hollywood, so Blade Runner became the working title that worked itself into the actual title of the movie, which is just fine because the story in the movie has only a cursory resemblance to the story you read in the book. What Stanley Kubrick (the director) got right was the feel of the book, and that was more than enough.