Flightly thinking

I am about to leave for the airport - no posts today or tomorrow, I suspect.

Let us trust that the plane is more robustly constructed than the vehicle in the picture.

Forlorn thinking

How awful it is to lose someone. To wake up for the sole purpose of spending a little more time with this person that you have loved, and love. The person who gives you the only reason you have to open your eyes, to roll from your bed, to wake up for, to keep breathing for.

But then, after the despair of finding them gone, after the stages of grief, and after the denial, the anger, the guit, the growing acceptance... how nice to find them stuck in the crack of your bum, there all along.

There is a god after all. He just has one bastard sense of humor.

Florange thinking

My neice and her husband are here in Hawaii, to house sit while Glo and I go up to Canada for a week. House sitting in our house requires certain talents, given that we own two pretty neurotic parrots. From our point of view Kirsten and Kenny are here to take care of the birds.

Their point of view is quite different. They are here to get sun tans. At this moment their skin is no longer pasty white, but it's not red either. It's florange.

Check out the little guy under the sun lamp up there. That's what florange looks like. Embrace the word, use it liberally, let's get this word out there and into the general population.

Florangistas, we have a mission.

Orange thinking

The claim, made by self-appointed self-styled lingua-pundits, is that there is no English-language rhyme for the word "orange."

I have three things to say.

First, before this entry has ended, I will disprove the hypothesis.

Secondly, shame on us all! Where has the creative thinking gone, folks? I'm mean it's like the weather with everybody talking about it and nobody doing anything about it. If you were smart enough to make up a name for your company that rhymed with "orange" you'd make the local news, maybe even national! Advertising would be all done for you, for free, and a whole new bunch of doggerel would be written, much of it ending with lines like, "And a smile of face of the orange..." and your company name up above somewhere.

Thirdly I will create a word that should exist, but doesn't exist. And yes, that word will rhyme with "orange."

Quickly though, the origin of the word "orange." It comes from Sanskrit, as do any number of other words in the English language including "huzza huzza" and "Oh, yeah baby..." The translation of "orange" as used in the original Sanskrit is "apple."

First item of business, disprove the hypothesis that there is no English-language rhyme for "orange." I draw to your attention the following fragment of poetry, found in an ancient Emergency Room. Internal evidence suggests that it was written after the advent of the automobile, but not all scholars agree. In any case, here in all its visually moving imagery and its own unique pathos, is the only remaining fragment of the work:

We're off on a lovely beach-walk,

The sun is setting orange.

But I cannot go with 'er;

Me thumb's stuck in the door 'inge.

Less academically satisfying perhaps, given that what appears may be simply a spelling error and not an actual word, is this anonymous quatrian:

Renovate? I can't wait

To paint the ceilings orange!

Gathering the furnishings

And putting them in storange.

Finally the creation of a new word. This word is inspired by quantuum physics, one of my hobbies. One of the fathers of quantuum physics was Neils Bohr. Another was Walter Heisenburg, he of the Uncertainty Principle. Combining the two:

bohrange: a measure of the extent to which uncertainty is widespread.

Thus, the wisdom of the war in Iraq has a very high bohrange. Impressions of W's intelligence, at least among my friends, enjoys low borange.

Green thinking

Green is a good color, despite Kermit's whingeing about how hard it is to be green. (That is the British spelling of the word "whining." The British spelling "whingeing" looks more like it's whining than the other, do you not agree?)

Green is natural and indicates a healthy environment. But actually now that I've said that, there is a strange greenish pallor that comes over the faces of the really really seasick that doesn't look so good.

Green is often natural and usually indicates a healthy environment. When the sunlight drips through the canopies of leaves in my back garden the light becomes a soft, inhalable green, cool, refreshing, calming.

Green is de riguer today. We have finally got it, that we've screwed the planet up pretty badly and it's time to re-think our basic approach. This is a very desirable thing.

Take a look at World Change, which is filled with ideas about how we can be green using the technology we already have. I am not sure what to make of the announcement at the top of their home web page that the domain worldchange.org is for sale, followed by two telephone numbers you can call if you want to buy it. I don't want to buy it, but I called one of the numbers. I reached BuyDomain.com and spoke to Chris. He offered to sell me the domain name worldchange.org for $2,700. I asked if the domain name came with all the content included and he allowed as to how it did not.

I wonder if "they" will recycle the content? Or at least composte it? I am wondering what the composting of virtual stuff produces, and what it would fertilize. If they don't recycle or composte it, will they just drop it all in the trash bin for somebody else to worry about? Ship it to India, I'll bet, or China.

That is silly, of course. But you do have to wonder where ideas go when nobody is thinking them any more. And where "content" goes when it's gone. And what the owners of worldchange.org will do with their share of the $2,700 from BuyDomain.com. It seems a very small amount of money.

But then, one mustn't whinge about that. Money, after all, is green.

Refreshing thinking

I have a vacation coming up! On this vacation I will:

read a book a day;

read three newspapers daily;

paint the guest room;

mow the lawn and red0 the floral thingummy;

get to that termite problem once and for all;

teach the parrot to cuss;

take over all housekeeping responsibilities including getting both of us started on the South Beach diet;

run five miles every day;

walk the dog along the beach including picking up after him;

clean out the garage;

watch a lot of television.

Hold on a minute. May be I should edit this list a bit somehow or I'm going to run out of time.

Try this - read Curious George each time I sit on the john, as many times as it takes until I'm finished the whole book. Screw the newspapers. Buy paint for guestroom and give it to Gloria as a mother's day present, with a nice brush and roller set. Pay the neighborhood kid to mow the lawn including the floral thingummy. Raise a glass to the termites, hard workers that they are and I admire that in anyone. Cuss at the parrot. Drink from the bottle so as to aviod making a mess for Glo to clean up, and eat lots of burritos which I believe is the South Beach way. Drive five miles a day, dropping the dog off at the beach to make his own way home. Tell him not to poop on the way. Close the garage door.

Watch a lot of television.

Optimisitc thinking

I have decided to embrace optimism as a faith. Some of the central tenets of this faith will be:


Metamucil makes a man sexy.

Women love pot-bellied men.

Livers, like diamonds, are forever.

Flat feet are a sign of stability.

When they say of me, "There's no fool like an old fool," they mean that in the good way.

The brown spots on my skin are good omens put there by the skin fairy.

Not being able to hear much gives me an opportunity to spend quality time, albeit with silence.

Aching hips are the hallmark of physical fitness.

My toes are still there. I don't have to be able to see them. In fact they prefer it that way.