Rosary Ladies, Rich, and the Rick-Rack Cactus Flowers

 

Today I worked from home and had a lot of meetings. Travalon and I walked on Governor's Island at lunch, and we saw these cute mushrooms.

Then he left to go see Willy Nelson and Bob Dylan at Alpine Valley, and after work I went to Craftsman's Table in Middleton to meet Anna Banana II, Jilly Moose, Richard Bonomo, and OK Cap for dinner. It's a straight shot down Highway M for me, so I got there fifteen minutes early and got us a table outside. (Part of the reason I left so early was because a train was coming, and I hopped in the car to catch it at the crossroad, but first someone was coming from the left, then someone was coming from the right, so when I could finally turn onto Westport Road, the train had almost passed.) 

When someone at a nearby table got a sample of green beer, I had to order my own glass.

A Youngblood fruited sour - delicious! I think it might be the same one I had at the Brazilian concert a few weeks ago. It tasted like pineapple. My dinner was delicious too: potato-encrusted walleye and green beans. I did bring half of it home because we ordered a giant Oktoberfest pretzel before dinner, being too hungry to wait. That was also very tasty. Rich ordered a chocolate mousse so we could compare it with his, but this one was thicker, more like a custard. It was so chocolatey. We sat around talking for quite a while, and then I hoped to see a train at the crossing on my way home, but it came a few minutes later, while I was on Night Prayer.

Got another weird DuoLingo saying today.

Also, Travalon drew this picture at work, but not for Jilly Moose's birthday. He just felt like drawing a moose.

The last couple of days I thought there was a wonderful scent around me, like when Travalon and I walked by Stricker Pond last night before going to Jilly Moose's birthday dinner, and today it was really strong in the kitchen. I thought I was having scent hallucinations, which only happened to me once before, right before I had a seizure, so I wondered if the anesthesia had done something strange to my brain. Then the logical part of my brain took over and said, "Check the obvious source - your rick-rack cactus," and sure enough, it has one bloom past its prime, another right in its prime, and a bud. It has gotten very big and is sitting on a bar stool, and the flowers are on the side I can't see easily, so I had to pick it up to find them. Hopefully this doesn't portend something bad, since the last time it bloomed, Dear Leader was somehow elected a few days later. 

Speaking of all that, I was fascinated by the text messages they released purportedly between Charlie Kirk's assassin and his trans lover. It reminded me of that essay by Mark Twain, "The Literary Crimes of James Fennimore Cooper." How could someone in such a desperate state of mind write such long, flowery texts? People who know more than I do also pointed out that he used terminology that only cops use, which seems unusual for a college dropout who had no background in law enforcement. It does seem strange to think someone would write long texts like that; I only do it on the computer, and so I can only harass others with iPhones that way. Writing on the phone itself? Forget it, I'm keeping it as short as possible! And I'm not even running from the cops.

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St. Matthew's Passion and the Stuffed Olive

 

Friday I was feeling under the weather, but it was a relaxed day of working at home, and then Saturday I had a very relaxed morning, so I was feeling much better when it was time to meet Tiffy downtown. It was a sunny day, but not that warm. After lunch at the Globe, we walked to the Hamel Music Center to buy tickets for the Bach St. Matthew's Passion, but apparently the venue doesn't open until an hour before the show starts. We were afraid of the tickets selling out, so we walked to the Union, and I bought them online. We passed Calvary Lutheran Hapel on the way.

The Red Gym is being renovated, and Tiffy noted that it looked like a Frank Lloyd Wright design, so I took a picture to prove it to you.

We hung out at the Union for a while, half watching a basketball tournament game on the giant TV in the Rathskeller and then moving to another area overlooking the lake. Eventually we made our way to her sister's apartment building, then as we were walking back down State Street to find some dinner, we ran into Travalon, his high school buddy, and his buddy's daughter, who were at the high school basketball tournament. They had already eaten, so they didn't join us. We thought of going to a new Japanese restaurant where the late, lamented Dubai used to be, but the music was so loud in there that we walked back out and went to our favorite Chinese restaurant on State Street. We got to the Hamel Music Center during the talk about the program beforehand, and to my surprise I saw two faculty members from my department, Kathbert, and the woman who used to run the book study I was going to on Thursday nights. The program was amazing, and all the focus on innocent Jesus being accused of crimes he didn't commit and then sentenced to death made me think of these Venezuelan refugees who were accused of being gang members because they had tattoos of their favorite soccer team or their grandmother's date of death or whatever and then being sent to a horrible prison in El Salvador. When people suffer like that, so does Jesus. He would have been closer to the prisoners in the slaves ships back in the day than to the people who enslaved them. Jesus is always with the downtrodden. 

The musicians in this performance were extraordinary. Every member of the choir had at least a little solo, and we were amazed to see two oboe players playing these odd, curved instruments with a bell like a trumpet at the end. There was no explanation in the program of what they were, but they sounded good. The performance was so long that we didn't get out until after 11, and then we had to walk back down State Street, and then I had to drive home, so you can see why I didn't blog yesterday.

It may be Daylight Saving Time now, but it's also Central DuoLingo Bragging Time:

Today the bishop was at Mass, so it ran really long when I wasn't feeling that well. Also, Tiffy wondered if we didn't want to go to brunch, since she hadn't heard from us. We went back downtown to join her for brunch at the Stuffed Olive, where our poor waitress had had to work until 3 am and then get up and work the brunch shift. Yikes! I like these neon designs in the bar.

Travalon and I split an alcoholic Shamrock Shaken. Isn't it beautiful?

It was tasty too. Unlike yesterday, today was very rainy, so we waited a bit to see if the rain would subside, but it didn't. Eventually we braved the rain, and we passed an arcade bar that Travalon had a free play card for, so he played for a few minutes while Tiffy and I talked on the top floor of her sister's apartment building. When Travalon returned, Tiffy and I asked him pretty much in unison, "How did you do?" and he said, "There were a lot of dead frogs," since he was playing Frogger. Then she headed home, and we stopped by Cherokee Marsh because my old coworker who lives up there said there were pelicans there. There were indeed dozens of them, but Travalon didn't have his good camera, and anyway it was too wet to get out and take a photo. 

In the evening I went to the Slow Irish Session. There had been a lot of back and forth about this with my band, because our leader wanted us to get together with the Ukrainian accordionist, but Hardingfele is the only one who could communicate with him, since Russian is her first language, and she couldn't get a hold of him. Our leader wanted me to forego the Irish session to go to band practice with the accordionist, but since there was no accordionist, the whole band came to the Irish session. It was like I was with all my buddies, because my Irish teacher who plays the concertina and the woman with the very Irish name and the curly red hair who plays the flute and tin whistle were there too. We were just missing my Shamrock Club buddy, but I don't know if she even plays an instrument. You know me, I can't let a session go by without requesting "Drowsy Maggie," and I did really well on all the other tunes too, except a wonderful tune called "King of the Fairies" that I couldn't seem to master. Maybe next time...

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New Capybara

 

Travalon went to the zoo today, and they have a new capybara! Yay! The old one died a few months ago.

Today I had to take the bus straight home from work, and the bus website recommended the D2 instead of the B. That was fine with me, because it comes to a much closer stop, and also I wouldn't have to cross the street when I got off of it. The D2 goes to the airport, so I settled in for a long ride... but it went basically the same route as the old 28 that used to get me to my car in the old days. Confusingly enough, there is still a 28 bus, and it goes north, but not far enough north for my purposes. Now I'm wondering why I couldn't take the D2 to work as well, since it would drop me off much closer than the B bus does. Oddly, the website says I have to take the B bus to campus, yet I could see the D2 bus picking people up not far from where I parked. I would have to cross a street to catch it, but that seems worth it for the blocks of distance it would shave off once I got to campus.

Speaking of campus, it's kind of embarrassing that our university is becoming known for disasters. Not one, but two very recent bad news stories have made national news: a pier collapsed at the Union because too many students were on it; and a girl was attacked, raped, and beaten by some rando. The first story is more dramatic than serious; nobody was badly hurt, although one person did go to the hospital for what turned out to be minor injuries. The second story is far scarier, but now they have caught the guy. He was pulled over earlier in the evening, so they had the cop's body cam footage to match up with the footage from security cameras in the area of the attack. One creepy detail is that someone arrived on the scene, attracted by the commotion, and the perpetrator pretended to be someone who had just come across the girl himself, but then he took off before police arrived. The girl had life-threatening injuries (judging by the charges against the guy, he strangled her), but now they say that she will survive. I certainly hope she makes a full recovery! And I am so relieved that they caught him! His bail is set at a million dollars - frankly, I'm surprised that they would even consider bail. Lock him up and throw away the key!

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Saturday Night Excitement in the Neighborhood

 

Today I saw an awesome quote in the Comments section of an article on the Washington Post: "Live your lives such that if someone made a book out of them, the book would be banned in Florida." It was a pretty quiet day otherwise, because I worked from home. My neighbor and I did take some photos in the neighborhood. First, are these flowers, or is this a bird looking at me??

This is a mock orange. It smells so good!

Here is a pair of cranes with two babies.

The pair with one baby now has no baby. My neighbor has a theory about that, because we saw the baby Saturday morning, but today it was gone: on Saturday at 1:30 am, there were sirens in our neighborhood. (She heard them, but I slept right through them after my exciting day in Port Washington.) Another neighbor told us it was the cops chasing a guy who drove into our dead-end road - oops! Sucks to be him! He got out and ran, but they caught him. This other neighbor slept through it too, but she said the brother of the famous late comedian heard dogs and saw flashlights behind their houses, so we think all the excitement could have flushed the baby crane out of the safety of the marsh... and straight into the path of a speeding cop car. The timing makes sense for this. 

While I didn't hear the sirens on Saturday night, last night I heard a very long train around 3:30 am. It woke me up, but I wasn't mad because I love trains; I just rolled over and went back to sleep, very happy. Of course, in India they had a very bad train accident, so they aren't always safe. And then there was the plane flying over DC with the unresponsive pilot. When they sent the fighter pilots up at top speed to try to intercept it, they broke the sound barrier, so there was a giant BOOM over DC. That must have been freaky to hear!

This evening Travalon and I sat on the dock. The sunset looked hazy because of all the smoke from the forest fires up in Canada.

I can tell this smoke is really bothering me because when it was so hot and we had the AC on, my eyes weren't watery, but as soon as we were able to open the windows, my eyes started watering. Oddly, I didn't have a problem being outside all day in Port Washington, but they had a lot of breeze to blow the smoke away. I did forget to mention the stunning moonrise we saw on our way back from Port Washington. It was too hard to get a photo of it from the car, but it was glorious. The moon looked like a giant gold coin low in the sky.

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My Sign Is "In a Meeting": Illustrated!

 

Today at work we spent the first hour or so cleaning the common areas. Then I had to cancel yet more hotel rooms because apparently a guest speaker fell for an online scam when applying for a visa, and he didn't find out until arriving at the airport that his visa wasn't valid. How much does that suck?? At least the hotel waived the cancellation fee because it was beyond his control that he couldn't come, and it wasn't an issue with the other hotels because it was more than 24 hours' notice. Yesterday I had to cancel hotel rooms for someone else who couldn't come because our country won't let anyone in who has a criminal record, even if it's for protesting as a college student decades earlier. I mean, really? That is not what I would call a hardened criminal. People shouldn't even have to go to jail for protesting the government, if they're not actually causing damage or injuring people, but unfortunately that's not how it works in a lot of places - sometimes it seems like people get stricter punishments for protesting than others do for actual murder. Certainly in this country it often seem like rapists get light sentences. Puzzling, that.

As promised, here is the photo our chair took of me wearing my "In a Meeting" sign.

I hope it was worth the wait.

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The Pheasant and the Easter Bunny

 

Yesterday our alumni newsletter had some great April Fools articles, but then a terrible thing happened that wasn't an April Fools: someone had stolen my debit card number somehow and put over $100 worth of charges on it. They were all to Apple.com, so I called their number, but all I got was an automated system that eventually hung up on me. I called my credit union, and they said they would dispute the charges and credit my account. We never did figure out how anyone would have gotten my number, so just know it's a jungle out there.

This morning it was snowing, so Travalon and I cleaned, and I found the two rosaries I had been looking for: the chartreuse one I got at St. Patrick's in Mauston that glows under blacklight, and the rainbow one I got at the treasure shop on Willy Street last year. They are two of my favorites, but then all my rosaries are my favorite ones. Then the mail came, and I got a package from the secret club I am in. The secret message (which I had to decipher) was to grow a whimsy garden for Wonder Marty (the tiny penguin that is our mascot), and when I told Travalon, he said, "We'll have to go to the winkle dinkle shop!" I laughed so hard! He said that was based on a Monty Python skit. 

We were planning to walk at the mall with Jilly Moose, and when we walked out the door, we came face-to-face with what appeared to be a male ring-necked pheasant that didn't have the long tail feathers. Of course we, the Bird Paparazzi, were unprepared and didn't have a camera, so we just watched and laughed as the bird ran away from us with its head bobbing. It was very fleet-footed. Then we met Jilly Moose, and we started at Barnes and Noble, where I found an adorable stuffed cactus on the floor, so I had to get it. We also went to the alpaca store, and Jilly Moose and I got rosaries. We walked around the mall, and in one shop we saw stuffed pillows that looked like male members, so Travalon said we should get two and have a cock fight. (We didn't get any.) He was so funny today - when I was telling him about a black bear that was breaking into people's houses and eating their food, so it was hugely obese and they were calling it Hank the Tank, he said the Wank family should adopt it so it would be Hank the Tank Wank. We also saw the Easter Bunny waiting for kids to have their photos taken with him, but it was extremely expensive to have professional photos taken, so the photographer just took our photo with my phone, even though a sign said no personal photos. So that was very cool of them. If we wanted to spend a fortune, we would have to at least come prepared, instead of wearing hoodies.

Then we went to the Asian food court and grocery store, and we had bubble tea. The Asian bakery on Park Street has a section for lotus paste buns, but they never have any, so we were overjoyed to find frozen ones at the Asian grocery store. We will have to make them soon! 

Here are photos from today. First, the three of us with the Easter Bunny.

Here are the stuffed cactus and rosary I got at the mall.

Here is a picture of the female bufflehead that Travalon took off our pier.

Here is the male bufflehead.

And here is the sunset from our pier tonight.

Once we got home from the mall, I went back outside to try to find the pheasant, but there was no sign of him. Kathbert called me as soon as I stepped out the door to tell me she found a birthday card I had made for her so long ago that I signed it with my detested nickname, and it featured a bird called a slue pumper saying, "Oonka-chunk," and the kicker is that I noted that the picture would glow under blacklight. So I was into them even back then?? Neither of us remembered this, but there it was. I will try to take a picture of the card glowing under blacklight soon. I did note that we should be kind to the pheasant if we ever find him again, since he was going through a lot. Our parking lot!

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The Narwhal Horn as a Tool of Antiterrorism

Culture clashes are weird, and they can even happen between us Midwesterners and people from other parts of this country. For example, I come from a straightforward cultural milieu where I might say, “I really like your hat!” and the other person takes that the way it was meant, as a compliment, and says, “Thanks!” If they say anything else, like offering me the hat, they actually mean it. But apparently there are other places where people play some sort of game in which they offer you the hat you like, but they don’t mean it, and you are supposed to play along and demur, then they offer it again, and you go through this process several times, always demurring the offer of the hat you love. The problem is that I think they mean it and take them up on the offer the first or second time, and then they are grumpy and resentful. Not that you can say one culture is better than another, but I say this is hella whack – what kind of sadistic culture plays a game like, “You like this? You want it? I’ll keep offering it to you, but you CAN’T HAVE IT!!!” F that! Either just take the compliment that was originally all that was intended, or mean it when you offer someone the damn hat. Can we get these other cultures to just stop?

Maybe the craziest headline lately has been the one about the two guys in London who stopped a terrorist attack with a fire extinguisher and a narwhal horn. If you, like me, wondered, “Who has a narwhal horn on their person?” then you will be delighted to learn that this person was working in a restaurant with a narwhal horn on the wall, and he grabbed it and charged at the terrorist, and now he is getting a medal from the Polish government. He is a Polish national, and all I had heard about him is that his first name is the same as a faculty member in our department, so this faculty member says he is going to post the story on his office door after I told him about it. If you are wondering what a narwhal is, then we can’t be friends. Just kidding, read this.

Tuesday I took a long lunch because a fellow choir member’s mother had died, and the choir sang at her interment ceremony. I thought this would be outside so I wore boots, but it was in the mausoleum. Kathbert joined us and sang alto, so I sang soprano along with the daughter of the deceased, and we actually sounded really good a capella. Afterwards it was a gorgeous day, and I bemoaned missing my usual lunchtime walk, so Rich and Kathbert suggested we visit another choir member who died in 2005 and Mr. Why, whom I have mentioned many times on this blog. This was one of the few times we could easily find his grave marker, because all the snow has melted. Usually we are visiting him on the anniversary of his death on the First of March, and there is always a ton of snow in the cemetery. Hard to believe it’s been over a decade since he left us. He never met Travalon or knew Trump would be president. We miss you, Mr. Why!

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Cybercriminals Strike Again!

These online cybercriminals are just getting worse and worse. This weekend I was saying to Tiffy that if they devoted this much energy to worthy pursuits, they could find the cure for cancer: “After all, if they can find their way around encryption software, they should be able to find their way around the immune system!” Timely words indeed, because I just got notice of another database hack. As you may remember, my identity was stolen this spring, then my credit card number was stolen this summer, and Travalon’s was too, just a few weeks later. Luckily, in both our cases, the fraudulent charges were denied, probably because they were outside our usual spending habits. Then just today I was notified that the online stock trading company I have an account with had been hacked. Fortunately they believe the only information stolen was contact information, like our addresses and phone numbers, and that they couldn’t get at our passwords. That is good, because my pathetic little collection of electric company stock should be safe, and if these people want to write a letter to me, they can be my guest. The breach supposedly happened in 2013, but the company wasn’t allowed to tell us until the Feds were done with their investigation, which means the only address these people would have for me is my old condo, and the forwarding address from that is long since expired. I am hoping nothing dire comes of this, but it does scare me, because these criminals are getting too clever. This is why I keep my old flip phone, because smart phones can be hacked, and then if that is the phone number I have for verification and they get my bank account password too, they could access my money. But nobody can hack a flip phone, as far as I know, so if they don’t have the phone in their possession, they can’t receive the verification code to get into my account. So there, cybercriminals. Old Skool technology will stop you guys cold.

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More Adventures in Boating

I hope my readers had an excellent, if very hot, weekend. Friday evening Travalon and I decided to take a moonlit boat ride, and I rigged up a lantern Richard Bonomo had given us to the front of the boat with a bungee cord. Just when I was feeling clever (and beautiful, because Travalon said the light made me glow), the bugs began swarming around me in a big cloud. That made for a very strange ride. At least none of them bit me. Otherwise it was a lovely night, with the second full moon in July, or as they say, a blue moon, though it did not look particularly blue.

Saturday Travalon and I ran errands all morning, including getting a baby shower gift for Light Bright (which I put in a gift bag emblazoned with butterflies, since I forgot she is having a boy) and getting a new seat for my bike. We had Cajun catfish sandwiches at the Big Ten Pub for lunch, even though I had made Cajun catfish for dinner the night before. Guess we just love our Cajun catfish! Then we took our longest ride yet in the boat, going out onto Lake Mendota and admiring the enormous houses along the shoreline. Some of them were just ridiculous, like palaces, and even their boathouses looked as big as our whole condo. In the evening Travalon went to Steak Night at Samba Grill with Rich, Twins Fan, Prairie Man, and another guy, while OK Cap, Luxuli, and I had pizza at OK Cap’s house and then swam in her outdoor pool. (Jilly Moose unfortunately had to work.) We even went in the hot tub, but it was REALLY hot, so then we went in the sauna, but it wasn’t warming up at all. Luxuli made brownies, and I brought one home to Travalon, who enjoyed it – he had been too full to eat dessert at Samba.

Yesterday we came home after church to find a message on our phone that someone had tried to use my credit card number to pay a $97 bar tab in Cancun, Mexico while we were at Mass. Fortunately my credit card company declined the charge, but I had to call a bunch of people about canceling my current card and getting a new one. After that we just wanted to go swimming, since it was so hot out, so we drove to Lake Mills and went swimming in Rock Lake, which is really clean and refreshing. They even have a bar on the shore like something you would see in Florida, so we had a drink there. We also checked out the beach at Lake Kegonsa, which was nice enough but not as wonderful as the one at Rock Lake. We ended the evening by picking up some chicken from Popeye’s and bringing it to Rich’s house to have dinner with him and the married B-Boy, and Kathbert stopped by to blat (as she calls it). I guess that’s a word – Spellcheck doesn’t have a problem with it.

No worries about my credit card – I stopped by my credit union today, and they printed a new one for me in about two minutes. Hopefully this one’s number doesn’t get stolen… Our best guess is that my number was stolen during that big hack of Home Depot’s database, since I had just bought carpeting and a washer/dryer from them for my old condo. 

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Fake Famous Hat

I had my identity stolen recently. It happened like this: I opened a PayPal account at the end of March, then when I requested a copy of my credit report a month later, someone had opened a credit card that same day. They used my maiden name, Social Security number, and date of birth, but the credit card company told me the email address they gave was different than mine, and their mailing address was in Pennsylvania. That is all they would tell me, except that there were charges on the credit card that I would not be responsible for, and they would close the account immediately. I reported it to the credit report agency, and they sent me a new credit report with that credit card removed. Richard Bonomo said I should report it to the police as well, so I started with the city of my mailing address. They said it was not their jurisdiction, and I was in the school district of another town, so report it to them. I did, and they told me I don’t actually live in their jurisdiction either but in a small township (which I already kind of knew) so I’d have to report it to the county sheriff, which I did. They called me and told me to report it to an internet crime website, so I did that. I also called PayPal and said it seemed like an inside job, since an employee of theirs would have had access to my information when I opened the account with them. Either that, or their online encryption is terrible. They denied that either thing was possible. So far I am not out any money, and my credit rating should be protected, but someone out there has all my personal information. Now there is some kind of hold on my record, so if I try to open a new line of credit, there will be all kinds of hoops to jump through. But hopefully those hoops would stop anyone posing as me.

I am not alone in having problems. My office is small, maybe twenty people, and at least two of them submitted their income tax returns this year just to be told that someone had already submitted one using their Social Security number. The joke’s on whoever did it, because they undoubtedly wanted their income tax returns, but both these people ended up owing. Still, someone is getting a hold of people’s Social Security numbers. It is very scary.

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Spoiled White Woman Loses Laundry

Sunday I looked at myself in the mirror of the restroom at the Union, and I saw my shirt from Ireland and my necklace from a tropical cruise. In that moment, I felt like an over-privileged white woman, traveling the world and buying souvenirs while people in other places struggle to get enough to eat. That didn’t stop me from buying a canoe with Travalon, but then yesterday I thought about it again. A load of my laundry got stolen from the Laundromat, which is kind of in the ‘hood. They took my underwear, including my favorite tie-dyed socks from Willy Street Co-op, my nightgown with little palm trees on it, my favorite Hawaiian shirt, and a couple of T-shirts I brought back from Ireland. Maybe this is my penance for being so well off, and now some poor kid in the ‘hood is going to get to wear shirts from Ireland even if he or she has no hope of ever visiting there. I actually have never been to Hawaii myself, but this poor kid has probably never even owned a nice aloha shirt, never mind having a prayer of setting foot in Hawaii. Anyway, that’s what I like to think, to make myself feel better about it. This isn’t the first time I’ve had laundry stolen, but this is the first time they took the whole load. This morning Travalon took me to Tar-Zhay to buy new underwear, and first we had breakfast outside. A Med Flight helicopter flew overhead, and I said that should give us some perspective, there is a person having a worse day than either of us. Besides, on the bright side, now I get a bunch of new clothes.

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Honey Bee Hive Heist

Toque McToque sent me an article from MSN Canada that is so cleverly written that I have to quote it verbatim here:

ABBOTSFORD, B.C. - Police in Abbotsford, B.C., are searching for a thief with sticky fingers, but it's not money or jewels that has gone missing. About 500,000 bees, as much as 3,600 kilograms of honey and 100 hive frames vanished from a remote Fraser Valley property, east of Vancouver, sometime between July 7 and 26. Total value of the brazen bee burglary is estimated at $100,000. Police say the targeted hives were set far back the road, on property along the Canada/U.S. border south of the Abbotsford airport, and the keeper had last checked his bees in the first week of July. Officers combing for comb say equipment and trucks would have been needed to make the gooey getaway, and they hope someone saw something that could make charges stick. They also believe they are searching for someone with bee keeping expertise because they say relocating that number of potentially belligerent bees can be dangerous without specialized knowledge. 

And because I didn't have time to blog yesterday, here is a bonus photo, also from Toque. I don't know who to credit for it, but it is hilarious.

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Missing Trailer

Sad but true story: my office mate Light Bright’s parents had a trailer stolen. They are in another state so there is not much she can do, but she decided to post an ad on Craig’s List, in case someone ran across a trailer by that description for sale. Her ad described the trailer and its contents and then said “Happy Holidays!” Immediately she got an email response as follows:

ITS NOT Happy Holidays. IT MARRY CHRISTMAS ....

I am not making any of this up.

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Misadventures in Music: Greeting Card Blues

Fourth in a series of musical misadventures.

When I was in high school, I had a crazy civics teacher who was entertainingly easy to confuse. One day someone took the mechanism out of a musical greeting card and stuck it to the ceiling of the classroom, where it continuously played “Happy Birthday to You.” Our teacher was a little hard of hearing so at first he didn’t notice, but eventually he became aware of music emanating from… somewhere. He asked us if we heard it too, but we all denied it. He nearly went crazy searching for the tiny mechanism, and it used up quite a bit of the morning too. (This was a summer school class, so it went much longer than classes during the year.)

That teacher did have some good stories. He kept promising to take us to the courthouse to watch a trial, which he never did, but at least he told us about trials he had seen. One day he took his morning class to a personal injury lawsuit, where the defendant, a large corporation, had a slick, big-city attorney and the plaintiff had a small-town guy like from a TV show, in a jacket and bowtie. It was very entertaining, he told us, but the afternoon class was sitting in on a murder trial, so he warned them it would probably be a lot of boring forensic evidence. Instead, they were cross-examining an eyewitness who got so tired of the questions from the defendant’s attorney that she stood up, jabbed her finger at the defendant, and said, “I know what I saw! I saw this son of a $@#* attack her!” So apparently murder trials aren’t always boring.

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Winchester Caroler Still Missing!

Banjo Player sent me the following article from one of her hometown papers, Wicked Local Winchester, and says, "Misleading headline of the week."  No kidding - did you imagine some young lady who went caroling with some friends had mysteriously disappeared and has yet to be found?  Are you wondering why this didn't make the national news?  Then you are not alone!  Those were my exact thoughts... until I read the Wicked Local Winchester article:

Winchester Caroler Still Missing

According to the Winchester Rotary Club, one of its carolers disappeared over Thanksgiving weekend and has not been found in spite of the good efforts of the Winchester Police Department. These figurines are expensive to replace and the Rotary Club believes the townspeople enjoy this annual display on the Quill Rotary each year. The caroler is blong, stand 56" high and has a yellow and white shawl. (She stands to the far right in this picture from last year.) The caroler can be returned by leaving her outside the Parish of the Epiphany Church at 70 Church Street, no questions asked, or send a note to the Rotary Club, P.O. Box 288 and club members will pick her up.

And here is the photo.  Sorry for the poor quality, but you get the idea.

I know you are probably thinking to yourself, "What is blong, is that a blond who blogs?  Would Famous Hat be a blong?  Wouldn't 'Blong' have been a great name for this blog if she had thought of it back when she had to come up with a name?  Or was the person who wrote this smoking a blong?"  How do I know?  Because that is exactly what I thought.  Now you can see why this story is WICKED LOCAL - do we as a nation care about a missing figurine of a caroler, even if she would be expensive to replace?  Perhaps what we should be concerned about is what the person who stole her is doing with her.  Today, caroling figurines... what if he moves on to actual carolers tomorrow??  As a living, breathing blong who has been known to go caroling and has no idea how close to my house Winchester is, I can barely keep a straight face while reading this story.  Remember, the blong figurine stand 56" high, which is almost as tall as I stands.  Almost.

Mad props to the Winchester Police Department for their good efforts.

Famous Hat

Harvard University Police Log

As you may remember, Banjo Player provided me with blog fodder in the form of that surreal police log about the incident involving her son at a university in Iowa.  At least the cops in Harvard seem to have decent grammatical and spelling skills... but who would want to live somewhere so rampant with crime?  Check out these actual police log entries:

7:24 a.m., November 24
Officer dispatched to a report of an alarm clock going off in Room 45 of Massachusetts Hall. Officer arrived and turned the alarm clock off.

9:24 p.m., November 25
Officers dispatched to a report of a flickering light in the area of the Academy of Arts and Sciences. Officers report Facilities Maintenance Operations was notified about the light.

8:54 a.m., November 28
Officers reports hearing a loud popping sound in Harvard Yard. Officer searched the area for anything suspicious with negative results.

1:36 p.m., November 28
Officer dispatched to a report of bells ringing in the towers of multiple buildings for a half-hour. Officer reports there were no bells ringing in the area.

Famous Hat

A Hard-Boiled Look at Private Dicks

The Case of the Coffee Cup Cabinet remains unsolved, although I am happy to report that we have recently received a shipment of coffee cups, so that problem has been alleviated. Toque McToque and I were discussing the merits of hiring a private eye, and I mentioned a book in my eighth-grade English classroom called The Hard-Boiled Dicks. It was about private detectives and was published in the 30’s or something, when presumably teenagers wouldn’t have found it snicker-worthy. (Back then did they learn about Homo Erectus and Lake Titicaca in school and not snicker at all?) Still, the title does raise some questions about potential private eyes:

• Is a hard-boiled private dick better than a soft-boiled one?
• How about a dick over easy? Sunny side up dick? Poached dick?
• What about a public dick? Would that be better than a private one?
• How can “Dick” be short for Detective AND Richard? In what reality does that make sense? Do these words have anything in common? It’s like when Spell Check on my email system didn’t recognize the last name Voigts and suggested either “vomits” or Virgos” and I’m thinking, what do these two words have in common other than starting with V and ending with S? However, quite appropriately, it suggested a coworker might want to change spaghetti “carbonara” to “coronary.”
• Speaking of Virgos and vomit, Ubi Caritas has a personal ad online that I will not say anything more about except that he is neither the defendant nor the plaintiff in any pending lawsuits, and I don’t know about you, but that is the first thing I like to know about a man. Also, he wants a woman to be feminine no matter how many years she has spent in the military.
• Hey, at least Ubi Caritas doesn’t put clichés in his personal ads. Hoodoo Head, the other Virgo who makes me want to vomit, is looking for a woman who can make him smile and isn’t selling anything.
• If you are wondering if either Ubi Caritas or Hoodoo Head are hard-boiled dicks, I don’t discuss exes on my blog.
• And the most important question of all: where the @#$%&* is that cabinet???

Famous Hat

The Case of the Coffee Cup Cabinet

It was a clear and sunny day when my client walked in. You know the type: one of those stuffed suits who can’t function in the morning without their dose of joe. He sized me up and said, “I don’t suppose you know where a fellow can find a Styrofoam cup around these parts?”

“That’s what I’m here for,” I replied. “But they’re in a secret location for their protection, so you must forget everything you’ve seen here today.”

Then I led him to a locked closet in which there had been a locked cabinet containing the aforementioned cups, never mind what I may think about people learning to bring their own coffee mugs to work. (Then I’d just have to train them to wash them out.) But to my consternation, the cabinet was gone. GONE!! Who could have stolen it, and why? The keys were still safely hidden in my office. Had the culprit been coveting the cabinet itself, or the cups therein?

There are few leads in the case. Suspect Number One is the janitorial staff, and I have served them with a subpoena entitled Work Order Request #S033605. So far there has been no response on their part.

Toque McToque has been on the case, rounding up suspects, but she has had no luck eliciting information either. Here is a typical interrogation:

Toque: I see that you studied a language while you were here.
Suspect: I took a class in Tasmanian American studies.
Toque: No, I mean a foreign language.
Suspect: Oh yeah, I took Zulu.

But this has gotten us no closer to solving the case. Our only break was when we discovered that someone had been keeping Keith the Plant confined in a plastic cup in order to create a bonsai dracaena. Of course, these were Styrofoam cups that were stolen, but possibly someone out there is plotting to grow an entire army of bonsai dracaenas. It is imperative that Toque and I stop him (her? it?) before this nightmare can become a reality. Please leave a comment with any information you may have that could be relevant to this case.

Keith the Plant: Not a Suspect

Famous Hat, Private Eye