Holiday Frenzy...

I am coming to the realization that I have no more Harry Potter movies to look forward to, and I haven't seen any trailers for holiday movie blockbusters, if there are any.  I guess we'll just have to deal with reality full-time.

It is hard to believe that it is already December.  The shopping frenzy is in full motion.  The "hurry for me and to hell with everyone else" drivers are out and gunning for parking places in every parking lot.  The Internet has become very busy with online commerce that is mostly tax-free (while it lasts).  Houses are improving in appearance by the addition of Holiday themed lights.  Some of the early one I remember as never have been taken down.  

And while this is all happening, Newt Gingrich's Tiffany bill is growing!


It is really hard to get into the Christmas spirit this year.  I guess they call it a depression for a reason....

THINGS I LEARNED LIVING IN THE SOUTH...
A possum is a flat animal that sleeps in the middle of the road.

There are 5,000 types of snakes and 4,998 of them live in the South.

There are 10,000 types of spiders. All 10,000 of them live in the South, plus a couple no one's seen before.

If it grows, it'll stick ya. If it crawls, it'll bite cha.

Onced and Twiced are words.

It is not a shopping cart, it is a buggy!

Jawl-P? Means, Did you all go to the bathroom?

People actually grow, eat and like okra.

Fixinto is one word. It means I'm going to do that.

There is no such thing as lunch. There is only dinner and then there's supper.

Iced tea is appropriate for all meals and you start drinking it when you're two. We do like a little tea with our sugar. It is referred to as the Wine of the South.

Backwards and forwards means I know everything about you.

The word jeet is actually a question meaning, 'Did you eat?'

You don't have to wear a watch, because it doesn't matter what time it is, you work until you're done or it's too dark to see.

You don't PUSH buttons, you MASH em.

Ya'll is singular. All ya'll is plural.

All the festivals across the state are named after a fruit, vegetable, grain, insect, or animal.

You carry jumper cables in your car - for your OWN car.

You only own five spices: salt, pepper, mustard, Tabasco and ketchup.

The local papers cover national and international news on one page, but require 6 pages for local high school sports, the motor sports, and gossip.

You think that the first day of deer season is a national holiday.

You know what a hissyfit is.

Fried catfish is the other white meat.

We don't need no dang Driver's Ed. If our mama says we can drive, we can drive!!! 

The woman entered the room, and with a knowing smile teasing her
full lips, she sank into the comfort of the plush chair in the
corner. The handsome stranger turned, having sensed her approach.
Locking his steely gray eyes on hers, he moved slowly toward her,
his experienced gaze measuring her, hypnotizing her with his soft
murmurs of assurance.

He sank to his knees before her and without a word, smoothly
released her from her constraining attire. With a sigh of
surrender, she allowed his foreign hands to unleash her bare
flesh. He expertly guided her through this tender, new territory,
boldly taking her to heights she had never dared to dream of, his
movements deliberate, confident in his ability to satisfy her
every need.

Her senses swam. She was overcome with an aching desire that had
gone unfulfilled for so long.

And, just as it seemed that ecstasy was within her grasp, he
paused, and for one heart-stopping moment, she thought, "It's too
big! - it will never fit!" Then, with a sudden rush, it slid into
place as if it had been made only for her. As pleasure and
contentment washed over her, she met his steady gaze, tears of
gratitude shining in her eyes. And he knew it wouldn't be long
before she returned. Oh, yes, this woman would want more. She
would want to do it again and again and again............

Don't ya just love shopping for shoes!

Airman Jones was assigned to the induction center, where he advised new recruits about their government benefits, especially their GI insurance.

It wasn’t long before Captain Smith noticed that Airman Jones was having a staggeringly high success-rate, selling insurance to nearly 100% of the recruits he advised.

Rather than asking him about this, the Captain stood at the back of the room and listened to Jones’ sales pitch.

Jones explained the basics of GI Insurance to the new recruits, and then said, “If you are killed in a battle and have a GI Insurance, the government has to pay $200,000 to your beneficiaries. But, if you don’t have a GI insurance and get killed in the battle, the government only has to pay a maximum of $6000.”

“Now,” he concluded, “which group do YOU think they are going to send into battle first?”

Stuff!

Why do people have so much stuff that they no longer can find what they want?  This, of course, forces them to buy again, adding to their "stuff".  The get storage lockers to hold their stuff and pay hundreds of dollars to store it.  When their lockers fill, they get another... and pretty soon they fall behind in the rent and the locker's contents gets auctioned off (as in Storage Wars on TV).  Storage lockers for more than a month make no sense.  All of the contents, for the most part, could be replaced with new for less than the rent of the locker, over a very short period of time.  People need to use what they have or get rid of it.  The people of this country suffers from a tremendous amount of hoarding, some more extreme than others, but still definitely hoarding.  People won't admit it, but we can all live with less- and still find happiness.  It is definitely a sickness.  

Nobody wants to fix anything anymore. The TV and appliance repair businesses are mostly defunct.  You can still find washing machine, vacuum and fridge repair shops, but they generally just replace large components.  They don't "fix" anything anymore.  The society has been conditioned to believe that fixing what you have cannot be as good as buying new, especially if it has some wild new feature that you just can't live another minute without.

Snowboarding Lessons
When you're 47 years old, you sometimes hear a small voice inside you that says: "Just because you've reached middle age, that doesn't mean you shouldn't take on new challenges and seek new adventures. You get only one ride on this crazy carousel we call life, and by golly you should make the most of it."

This is the voice of Satan.

I know this because recently, on a mountain in Idaho, I listened to this voice, and as a result my body feels as though it has been used as a trampoline by the Budweiser Clydesdales.

I am currently on an all-painkiller diet. "I'll have a black coffee and 250 Advil tablets" is a typical breakfast order for me these days.

This is because I went snowboarding.

For those of you who, for whatever reason, such as a will to live, do not participate in downhill winter sports, I should explain that snowboarding is an activity that is popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.

These are of course young people, fearless people, people with 100 percent synthetic bodies who can hurtle down a mountainside at 50 miles per hour and knock down mature trees with their faces and then spring to their feet and go, "Cool."

People like my son. He wanted to try snowboarding, and I thought it would be good to learn with him, because we can no longer ski together.

We have a fundamental difference in technique: He skis via the Downhill Method, in which you ski down the hill; whereas I ski via the Breath-Catching Method, in which you stand sideways on the hill, looking as athletic as possible without actually moving muscles (this could cause you to start sliding down the hill).

If anybody asks if you're OK, you say, "I'm just catching my breath!" in a tone of voice that suggests that at any moment you're going to swoop rapidly down the slope; whereas in fact you're planning to stay right where you are, rigid as a statue, until the spring thaw.

At night, when the Downhillers have all gone home, we Breath-Catchers will still be up there, clinging to the mountainside, chewing on our parkas for sustenance.

So I thought I'd take a stab at snowboarding, which is quite different from skiing.

In skiing, you wear a total of two skis, or approximately one per foot, so you can sort of maintain your balance by moving your feet, plus you have poles that you can stab people with if they make fun of you at close range.

Whereas with snowboarding, all you get is one board, which is shaped like a giant tongue depressor and manufactured by the Institute of Extremely Slippery Things. Both of your feet are strapped firmly to this board, so that if you start to fall, you can't stick a foot out and catch yourself. You crash to the ground like a tree and lie there while skiers swoop past and deliberately spray snow on you.

Skiers hate snowboarders. It's a generational thing. Skiers are (and here I am generalizing) middle-aged Republicans wearing designer space suits; snowboarders are defiant young rebels wearing deliberately drab clothing that is baggy enough to cover the snowboarder plus a major appliance. Skiers like to glide down the slopes in a series of graceful arcs; snowboarders like to attack the mountain, slashing, spinning, tumbling, going backward, blasting through snowdrifts, leaping off cliffs, getting their noses pierced in midair, etc.

Skiers view snowboarders as a menace; snowboarders view skiers as Elmer Fudd.

I took my snowboarding lesson in a small group led by a friend of mine named Brad Pearson, who also once talked me into jumping from a tall tree while attached only to a thin rope.

Brad took us up on a slope that offered ideal snow conditions for the novice who's going to fall a lot: Approximately seven flakes of powder on top of an 18-foot-thick base of reinforced concrete.

You could not dent this snow with a jackhammer. (I later learned, however, that you COULD dent it with the back of your head.)

We learned snowboarding via a two step method:

Step One: Watching Brad do something.

Step Two: Trying to do it ourselves.

I was pretty good at Step One. The problem with Step Two was that you had to stand up on your snowboard, which turns out to be a violation of at least five important laws of physics.

I'd struggle to my feet, and I'd be wavering there and then the Physics Police would drop a huge chunk of gravity on me, and WHAM my body would hit the concrete snow, sometimes bouncing as much as a foot.

"Keep your knees bent!" Brad would yell, helpfully.

Have you noticed that whatever sport you're trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent? As if that would solve anything. I wanted to shout back, "Forget my Knees! Do Something About these Gravity Chunks!"

Needless to say my son had no trouble at all. None. In minutes he was cruising happily down the mountain; you could actually see his clothing getting baggier. I, on the other hand, spent most of my time lying on my back, groaning, while space-suited Republicans swooped past and sprayed snow on me.

If I hadn't gotten out of there, they'd have completely covered me; I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of 47-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.

So I think, when my body heals, I'll go back to skiing. Maybe sometime you'll see me out on the slopes, catching my breath. Please throw me some food.

Bad computer viruses
INTEREST GROUP ECONOMIST VIRUS - Divides your hard disk into hundreds of little units, each of which does practically nothing, but all of which claim to be the most important part of the computer.

ECONOMETRICIAN VIRUS - Sixty percent of the PCs infected will lose 38 percent of their data 14 percent of the time (plus or minus a 3.5 percent margin of

POLITICAL THINK TANK ECONOMIST VIRUS - Doesn't do anything, but you can't get rid of it until next election.

GOVERNMENT ECONOMIST VIRUS - nothing works on your system, but all your diagnostic software says everything is just fine.

MARXIAN ECONOMIST VIRUS - Helps your computer shut down whenever it wants to.

SOVIET ECONOMIST VIRUS - Crashes your computer, but denies it ever happened.

MAINSTREAM ECONOMIST VIRUS - It claims it feels threatened by the other files on your PC and erases then in "self-defense."

CENTRAL BANK ECONOMIST VIRUS - Makes sure that it's bigger than any other file.

MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION ECONOMIST VIRUS - Deletes all monetary files, but keeps smiling and sending messages about how the economy is going to get better.

SUPPLY SIDE ECONOMIST VIRUS - Puts your computer to sleep for four years. When your computer wakes up, you're trillion more dollars in debt.

NEW ECONOMY VIRUS - Also known as the "Tricky Dick Virus." You can wipe it out, but it always makes a comeback.

ENVIRONMENTAL ECONOMIST VIRUS - Before allowing you to delete any file, it first asks you if you've considered the alternatives.