World Series, Game 7…out.
Cubs end a 108 year drought by winning the World Series!
There’s hope for the Leafs yet!!
Category: A Very Short Story
From the Short Story Vault
A Rat’s Ass
I couldn’t give a rat’s ass:
About the US Election;
About who wins the US Election. Yes Virginia, the sun will rise on November the 9th;
About Carbon Taxes or “The Air that I Breathe” (by the Hollies – 1974);
About the Toronto Maple Leafs. They won their first game this year. They’re already planning the parade!;
About Crap n Trade;
About pro-nouns or the anti-Christ;
About a Trans-am;
About Trans-Canada pipeline;
About Trans fat;
About Trans Gendered. Hey let Ze, He or Hir be him, her, or they, or whomever
About Climate Change;
About Global Warming;
About Global Cooling;
About space weather;
About weather
About Communities of Parties;
About Moonbats of Parties;
About Parties!
Heard last night that one lady wanted to give trick or treat-ers a toothbrush and some dental floss! I dearly hope she didn’t give out her address or where she lives as her house would surely be a prime target for the “egg man.”
About bad teeth;
Local news also ran a fairly lengthy segment about the fire hazards of Halloween costumes. That and the dental floss crowd will surely freak out new parents with young trick or treat-ers.
About do-gooders and Gladys Cravitz;
There is a danger around every pumpkin Virginia;
About white pumpkin lattes;
Jack-O-Lanterns trigger micro-aggressive behaviour; or was that just the sugar kicking in;
About safe spaces
Let kids be kids. Shut the front door for heaven’s sake;
About risk averse-ers;
Why do the media always focus on the negative?;
About the MSM;
Victorians complained about too little rain this past summer;
About the enviro-mental- lists
Victorians complain about too much rain this October;
About the LNG in the Saanich Inlet
Archimedes works for Big Oil
Eeee Gads!
Don’t worry, be happy – as Bobby McFerrin would sing. Whenever I feel low I think of this song.
It’s All Saints Day. It’s also my wife’s birthday and she is a real saint.
Hello Eve
Boo!
All Saint’s Day tomorrow: my wife’s Birthday
The Sport of Idiots*
There we were with our skates, parkas, toque perhaps, no helmets, gloves or mitts, blue jeans and the like. Red rosy cheeks, with clear warm snot running down from our noses. Sniff, sniff and sniff again: soon to be yellow tinged icicles hanging, dangling from our nostrils and the cleft of our chins. But hey, it was healthy snot! On top of that, tingling toes and burning fingers signalling the early onset of frostbite – but we didn’t care. We were alive and young, and free. The faster we flew on our blades the warmer we felt and exhilarated by the sweet nectar of being alive.
We would set up a couple of goals and play a form of pond hockey. The sound of slapping sticks or pucks to wooden blades: the swishing, whishing and crunching sounds of our blades on ice were the only sounds to be heard. Of course there was also the odd whooping, whistling and ribbing sounds coming from someone’s mouth when a deek, a fake or a shot of speed was masterfully executed. Laughing, sometimes arguing, ranting and definitely cursing when a puck went astray off the ice and into the snow. Normally we could find it but on those rare occasions when we couldn’t find the puck in the snow banks we came up with our favourite “Barrel Jumping” competition.
“Barrel Jumping” used to be an accredited winter sport, both amateur and professional. But it was never a winter Olympic event but it should have been. I remember watching it on the Wide World of Sport TV program: that late Saturday afternoon stalwart sports program, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat,” which I believe is no longer a fan favourite being replaced by the mundane and hyped Monday Night Football and the like. Barrel Jumping was a real man’s sport, sort of like winter’s version of the “High Jump and Long Jump” combined and all rolled into one event except that on completing the leap the competitor either landed squarely on his blades on the ice in triumphant jubilation or crash mercilessly, convulsively into the barrels themselves. Or, with hope upon hope, he tripped himself up after his leap into space falling on to his backside then sliding into the boards of the rink or snow bank. Unlike the “High Jump” there were no padded landing zones to break the skaters fall just the hard cold ice zone to break ones legs, one’s knees, ankles or pride. Concussions seemed to top the list as well. Probably a good thing as the more one became concussed the braver one became in this sport. It was like their badge of honour. No, it was not the Sport of Kings but rather the sport of Dentists, Orthodontists, Chiropractors and Idiots.
The premise being that, in spite of idiocy and insanity, it was all about jumping over plastic barrels on skates, on ice of course. The more barrels that were cleared the more adventurous and dangerous it became. It was very popular in the Northern States, particularly New York State around the Lake Placid area; Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine plus the backwoods of Quebec and parts of northern Ontario, Manitoba and Saskatchewan Canada. It was a hugely popular and well followed event. We all had our own barrel jumping heroes of course.
The competitor, or idiot on skates, would circle the barrels like some sort of displaced matador insanely focused on the barrels themselves that were racked side by side on the ice. Starting with one barrel the excitement and suspense of the fans grew exponentially as the number of barrels increased: two, three, five, eight, ten and on and on it went until there was only one man left standing, or sliding into the boards. The crowds would cheer as each participant cleared the barrels in flight and cheered even louder if one came crashing down into one of the barrels. The cacophony of oooos, aaaahs and groans were the real metric of approval. Scoring was dependant upon the competitor’s misstep and choreographed mishap, which was the real essence that made this event so compelling from a spectator’s perspective. With each subsequent jump the competitors would try and outdo one another for the admiration and adulation of the crowds. Some would twirl, some would spin and some would jump like a figure skater before building up the speed over distance that was necessary to clear the barrels. 10, 20, sometimes 30 miles per hour they could muster, their leg muscles bulging with every stride: their arms flinging in a sideways motion as if giving flight like an airplane or like the birdbrains that they were. The jumper must leap about 6 or seven feet in the air with a forward projection if he has any hope of clearing the barrels.
The competitor must have agility, speed and guts and be intellectually challenged if he is to be successful in this sport. Some would just leap and fall without the grace or agility of a showman. Others would appear to be running in thin air: their legs, arms and skates pumping like the madmen that they were while others had the audacity and fool’s courage to project themselves horizontally over the barrels once in the air, like a human cannonball or like superman in flight with their arms outstretched dead ahead only to come crashing down to earth headlong into the barrelled mass. These guys were a crowd favourite. In essence the sport of barrel jumping was never really about clearing the barrels but about the chaotic showmanship of the competitors and their relationship with the barrels themselves as they went flying in all directions.
Unfortunately Barrel Jumping never became an Olympic sport. Instead we have Rhythmic Gymnastics!
“It was too brutal of a sport” a commentator was heard to say. “No one ever made it as all the competitors seemed to fall on their backsides.
Yessss exactly
*Except from “I Thought I’d Died and Gone to Heaven”
Origin Of A Word!
Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Huh, What is that? Well, back in medieval times a family may have had one bath a week. husband first; wife, second; children in descending age and then the baby – last. Same tub, same water, though somewhat putrid and brown. Mother was always wary that when the water was subsequently thrown out that the baby was not tossed out with the lot. Hence the expression – “Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.”
And what about that old marital tradition of carrying the bride over the threshold? Well, again back in the golden olden days, houses, or cottages, had roofs of thatch. You can imagine the work in cleaning the floors. Just by the main entrance was a hold – for the thatch, or thresh, as it was called, and the hold a thresh-hold. It was customary therefore to carry one’s bride across this threshold so as not to soil the woman’s petticoats.
Many of our words and expressions have had their roots or genesis hundreds of years ago. Over the years these expressions or words have found themselves in our everyday vocabulary – some good, some bad, some laughable, some sad.
Consider this:
In the 16th and 17th centuries, everything had to be transported by ship, wooden ships of sail. Old wooden transports or scows with rotting timbers, creaking, expanding planks stretching with every yaw or pitch of the ship, every motion of the sea such that the caulking opened somewhat with the result that the ship’s bilges, lower deck and the holds were often times awash in seawater.
Now in those days, like today, the rich folk, the aristocracy, loved their gardens. They loved their great expanses of manicured lawns. Lawns without a single weed – uniformed carpets, emerald green and lush to the touch. Flowers of every kind – a horticulturalist’s dream. We have all seen these magnificent Italian, French and English country gardens. Unbelievable! Unbelievable that these gardens could be so spectacular without the benefit of modern day commercial fertilizers. Maybe so, but they did have manure in those days – huge shipments of the stuff. It was shipped in dry form because when dry, manure is very light and somewhat airy. Nevertheless dry manure shipped in these leaking ships posed a unique but significant problem. You see when dry manure gets wet it becomes heavier and the pungent process of fermentation begins of which a by-product is methane gas.
As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could and
did happen. Methane began to build up below decks and the first time
someone came below at night with a lantern, BOOOOM! Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was determined just what was happening. After that the bundles of manure were always stamped with the letters “S period; H period; I period; T period, such that the sailor always knew what they had on their hands.
This precaution was not always heeded and on one occasion a number of ships in company experienced such a fatal, yet awesome explosion of methane induced fireworks. On historical account there was one convoy of manure laden ships that met a week of extremely rough weather. As luck would have it, when the weather abated and the ships were back in company, at the most unexpected time “ KABOOM,” one of the ships exploded. It was such an awesome, awful sight to behold. The explosion was so spectacular that one seaman above decks in one of the accompanying ships was heard to exclaim:
“Holy S, period, H, period; I, period; T, period.” as the bales of manure so aptly labelled were flying everywhere. Asked later to explain the scene he so deftly uttered.
“It was like a shower.”
“A shower of what?” he was asked?
“A shower of S, period; H, period; I, period; and T, period. It was all that he could muster.
Indeed a number of these bales even landed on the fantail of a ship some two miles distant. So nervous and scared were some of the sailors on that ship that they could barely get the words out to explain the occurrence to their Captain. When asked what happened one of the sailors stammered:
“Sir: there was a huge explosion. There was S, period, H, period; I, period; T, period everywhere. The explosion was so strong that some of the bales marked S, period, H, period; I, period; T, period. hit the fffff fan – tail. It was unbelievable.”
A search for survivors was conducted. As luck would have it, the Captain and twenty of his crew were rescued. They found the Captain himself alone in the water in the midst of about 100 broken and destroyed bales. He was literally and figuratively found to be in the S, period, H, period; I, period; T, period.
Thus over the years, the decades, the centuries the acronym “S, period, H, period; I, period; T, period ” has evolved. You see many of the sailors in those times were illiterate – they couldn’t read or write. That is why the acronym S,period, H period, I period and T period was used. It was easy to pronounce and remember. Indeed over the years the acronym itself entered the English language. It can be found in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COED, 10th Ed, 2002; page 1324). Many of the expressions found in the dictionary and associated with that acronym today go back to that very fateful and terrible event.
And what is the meaning of the acronym S, period, H period, I period, T period that were marked on those bales?
Ship High In Transit!
It’s obvious!
Perhaps you were thinking of something else.
Originated by anonymous although embellished slightly by yours truly.