I don’t know what you are, but you scare me. And even considering that you’re an ambidextrous frog that can juggle apples with their own fusion reactor inside, even as they phase into another dimension, just scares me more. I’ll stick with Apple Jacks. Their font is more inspired, after all.
Perfect! Just what I’ve always needed. Now if I can only find my motorized package opener with the cardboard removal accessory …
Now that is a lot of utility work. There are four trucks in one spot. You never see that outside of a natural disaster.
From my Saturday evening ride. There’s a stretch out beyond nowhere that, when you hit it at the right time of day, feels like a portal to another place. If nine dead guys came out of those trees and asked if this was heaven or Iowa I would have had to tell them no, and also, there’s no baseball field for miles.
Here are a few clips of video from the Storybook Farm visit yesterday. One of them was just too fun to have simply disappear. This will take precisely 31 seconds:
If you ever want to get an education, post something just slightly wrong on the Internet. I noticed these Persian limes at the grocery store this evening and put the picture on Facebook, writing something silly like “Persian limes, from Mexico.”
My dear friend Kelly, who is not a horticulturist, but did stay at a Holiday Inn Express near some lime trees once, wrote “Persian limes are just a kind of lime. You know what makes them Persian limes? They aren’t Key Limes.”
One thing led to another and now I have to know all about this particular citrus. Wikipedia tells me they are also called Tahiti limes. Great, another geography-challenged fruit.
They were developed in California. I feel duped.
Kelly, as always, was right though: they aren’t key limes. Wikipedia, and I’ll take their word, says Persian limes are less acidic than key limes and don’t have the bitterness central to key lime’s unique flavor.
We bought the store’s entire inventory of groceries. It was us and the poor gentleman behind us at the checkout line who had to make do with the crumbs we left in the back corner near the dairy section. You’ll be happy to know that we remembered to save the earth this trip and took our canvas bags. (We sometimes forget. Once they made it into the car but not into the store.) The kindly man who bagged our purchase up managed to completely load them up. If we’d chosen plastic there’d be 14,000 bags floating around on the kitchen floor just now.
Those bags, too, have a purpose. We keep a small supply on a hook in the mud room, but eventually it swells out to something you have to bob and weave around, less you take a glancing blow from the big tumor of plastic. You only need so many of the things for storage and secondary disposal.
Really I want to take a competitor’s save the earth bags into our grocery store and see what they do. Would they sack the groceries up without complaint? Would they glare? Would there be a conference? Their big on conferences there. Would they signal in the manager, they are ever-present like you see in the movies set in casinos when the hero makes too much money and the suits get involved. They are much, much, nicer than all of that, but it is remarkable how quickly a manager will swoop in.
Alabama Adventure may be for sale again. This is an amusement park and water park combo near where I grew up. I remember, just after my senior year of high school Larry Langford, who was mayor of Fairfield, a suburb of Birmingham, pitched his plan for VisionLand to a room full of high school kids. It was his dry run. He announced the project publicly a few days later. All the nearby towns, he said, would chip in land and money for land and they were going to build this incredible park. It would start a bit small and grow every year. Langford got the land, got the money, got a lot more money from the state legislature and built his park. He even had a statue inside.
He’d go on to being on the county commission and then the mayor of Birmingham, despite still living in Fairfield. And now he’s in jail.
But the park has struggled since not long after it was created. The current owner is the third owner. It was the second owner, after the park went bankrupt (the $65 million project went for just $6 million), that changed the name from VisionLand to Visionland, and finally to Alabama Adventure.
The entire Wikipedia entry is a sad collection of grand ideas that never came to fruition for one reason or another. The place has earned a bad reputation in some respects, but there’s a lot of that going around that area, too. The best part of the place, to me, was that you could spend a day at a real theme park and not have to drive all the way back home from Atlanta smelling like stale water. Home was minutes away!
I had a few dates at the park, and one company picnic. On a separate occasion I took some nice pictures there. Some of those photographs went into my portfolio which helped me get other freelance work. Here’s one of them that just happened to be floating around in some dusty corner of the site. It isn’t the best one, but I loved the water bucket obstacle course part of the water park:
I scanned that eight years or more ago, which is why it is so small. I’ll dig up the original at some point and do it a bit more justice. (Don’t bet on it.)
I enjoyed the lazy river, and never caught any problem worse than standing in the place where the fireworks debris falls. You never think about that, when you’re watching fireworks, but the cardboard and the embers have to land somewhere. Don’t let it land on you.
In my freshman year literature class I wrote a comparative essay on Machiavelli’s Prince and Larry Langford. I’m sure the paper was dreadful, though I somehow recall getting an A on it. Don’t ask me why I kept that memory. Thinking back on it, though, I’m intrigued by how different parts now apply to Langford’s tale. Some of it was all wrong in the beginning, but he grew into the treatise’s notion of idealism (he was vainly spurring on a campaign to bid for the 2020 Olympics in Birmingham when his political realm fell down around him) and then it all turned into a sad, sad parody, as some considered The Prince.
Sometime after the second owner of the theme park came along they removed Langford’s statue. It was the preface to Langford’s version of Machiavelli’s Mandrake*.
Who comes here for obvious references to 16th century Italian comedies? You can raise your hand. It is OK. You’re among friends.
I trimmed the bushes today. Well, one bush. It was so hot that I’d broken into a sweat by the time I’d gotten the extension cord untangled.
So, one prickly shrub, scoop up the trimmings and remember that old saw about discretion being the better part of pruning.
When The Yankee came home she didn’t even notice the trimming. Subtlety is an art form, friends.
We rode our bikes this evening. Or I did. She tried, but had a flat close to home. We are out of tubes, so we’ll have a stock-up trip to the bike shop tomorrow. I got in 19 miles and was not pleased with any of it, really. Seems 10 days off is too many. Now I must recover my legs again.
But I cruised down a road I’ve never been on before, so that was a nice treat. Well, I’ve gone the other way, the uphill side, of that road before. Today I got to see how the road should be attacked: from its highest point.
This is a sunset somewhere over the southeast, as we traveled from Atlanta to St. Louis:
That same sunset, but without the plane in the way. Sometimes the fuselage helps, sometimes it does not. You may say it helps, especially when you are in the plane:
I love the next picture. There are a half-dozen stories in there. On the left, the man is explaining he’ll be home when he gets home. There’s the guy rushing, the three men in the middle who are beaten down by life and this airport. Just out of the margin is a clutch of young troopers, headed off to parts unknown. There’s the kid studying, or about to throw up, on the floor. The lady in the foreground is relaxed, her companion is ready to fly and the guy on the far right is doing business on his phone.
Of course I took this picture to point out the fancy plug/USB station, but people are always the better picture:
The sun setting over the Atlanta airport. We sat there, the sun in our eyes, for a long time. Seems the plane parked in our spot was running late.
Little Jimmy’s grandmother took him to the park after a long day of kindergarten. “Doesn’t it look like an artist painted the scenery? God painted this just for you,” she said.
“Yes” Jimmy said, “God did it and he did it left handed.”
“What makes you think God is left handed?”
“Well” Jimmy said, “we learned in Sunday School that Jesus sits on God’s right hand!”
Silly, but I love that joke. Always made me wonder if a heavenly hand could fall asleep. Someone could blame a lot of problems on that. Others would probably shake their head and agree. Burning needles in an appendage takes it out of a guy, they’d think, I can relate to that.
Dear parents that owe child support, pay your bills. Not only are you depriving your child, you’re embarrassing yourselves:
The best part is the deputy sheriff in his Auburn shirt. They went all out on this sting, except for the location. I mean, “You’ve won tickets to the game of the year! Come down to this abandoned granary to collect!”
You can tell football season is upon us. The team is practicing, students are starting to move back to town, and the summer term has wound down. We’re shopping for shirts. The Yankee wants a jersey for her birthday, and she has numbers in mind. The university seems to be marketing just three jersey numbers this season, and one of them is the one she wants. So that works out well. We hit a few stores yesterday, as I mentioned, looking for the right size and number combination. There were a few more stores today.
But first, the university library, where there is a documentary of some heft that must be obtained. We found it and, then, on the way out, walked by part of the Toomer’s Corner displays. These are the things people left after their poisoning was announced. How weird that still sounds:
They’re going to allow fans to roll the trees again this fall, which has a “roll ’em while you got ’em” feel. I’m not interested. Having had my share, and stood under the old trees during two conference championships, two undefeated seasons and a national championship I’ve more than had my fill. But here’s my feeling:
Yeah, they’re trees, and there are worse crimes against humanity than a crime against a local icon, but if you deprive children of their part of a long legacy we should find a small space under a heavy, cramped jail for you. But that’s just me.
Here’s another neat one from the display:
Here’s more on the collection, including a few other artifacts. The archivists say no one has ever had to preserve something like toilet paper before. The things we celebrate are temporary, the hard part is making the memories last forever.
They are getting the stadium ready. In a month more than 87,000 people will be inside there. It is silly and spectacular and true:
Came home to do productive things. Planned out a presentation for next week, tinkered with the video chat feature of Google Plus. We are living in the future. Somehow the economy didn’t seem so bad in our imaginations, but still, video chat across two states. This is a step up from last week’s test of the platform, where four of us chatted in one room. And by room I mean our living room. It was delightfully geeky.
Jeremy, the host of The War Eagle Reader stopped by for a chat. Did you know he edited the Maple Street Press? Did you know I’m in that magazine? It isn’t bad, though all agree the photo selections and the cutlines could be better. The content, though, is insightful.
He loaned me a book, which I am interested to read. First I must put it on top of the To Read stack and finish the other two in progress. Once upon a time I’d read three at a time. Now I do well to get in two. Seems I’m reading lots of other things, too. Makes me wonder what this does to one’s reading comprehension. Is it really useful if I can later only say “This one book I read … ” or “I recall in … some study or another … ”
Now, I wrote last month about my joy of books, but the one thing that could replace that would be the convenience and joy of search. If I could put everything in a reader and then refer back to the term or author or time I was reading the thing … now that would be something.
And according to the Booth Theory of Commercial development, Google or Apple has that in R&D right now. And when it comes out in six months I’ll only need a way to transfer everything I’ve ever read, ever, into the reader for cross tab indexing.
Well, maybe I could leave out the Black Stallion series and various old Robin Hood tales. Who needs those now? I’ve always questioned the fingers wrapped in the horse’s mane. And the only part of the Robin story I recall better than a movie or BBC episode is that he feebly loosed an arrow from the Kirklees Priory and where the arrow landed was where he is buried. Great tale. Of the many great Robin Hood tales over the last millenium that one, I’ve just learned, is from the 18th Century. I read that as a child at my grandparent’s one summer. Why? It was there.
I may have a reading problem, and it started early.
Barbecue for dinner tonight, risking crowds from a dual graduation/move in weekend. Do not visit a grocery store, Walmart or Home Depot on weekends like this. You take your life into your own hands.
So we stand in line at Moe’s, order our barbecue and then stand around for a table. This is a bit difficult. As reasonable as the food is, they’ve taken great pains to push you out of the door — awkward decor, lighting that is off just so, poorly placed televisions, uncomfortable chairs — but people just sit around. And sit around. And sit ar —
“Ticket number THIRTY-FIIIIIVE!”
We’d only just found a table, having identified a group that put two together, sat with friends and then left. The table for eight stayed joined when only three were there. And so we made our own, grabbed the food, ate and hustled out of there before the loud, live music started.
