Wednesday: Why Do It Be?
Mamacita says: I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, exactly a spring chicken these days, but when the time comes that I stop asking questions, they can bury me. In fact, they should. What possible use is a person who doesn’t ask questions and seek answers? Can’t think of a thing.
I’m not presumptuous enough to believe that all of my questions are of earth-shattering importance. I’m just saying that there are many things I don’t know. Perhaps some of you DO know, and can enlighten me. Much appreciated.
1. Why are the Beatles, albeit 50% deceased, still as cool as ever, while so many once-loved , above-ground rockers now seem kind of sad with a tinge of desperation?
2. How old is “too old” to use “The Logical Song” as a ringtone?
3. Why do so many of my students think it’s actually OKAY to use those ignorant texting codes in a college essay? Do they not write essays in high school? Are those things acceptable at that level? Because that’s so wrong. . . .
4. How do people who lie, cheat, steal, betray, and walk out on people who trusted them, live with themselves? How can they sleep at night? Why do we keep electing them? If they do it to a spouse, child, or friend, they’ll do it to us.
5. Why don’t people know that recipes that call for egg whites almost always work fine with the whole egg? The only exceptions I’ve found so far are white cakes. Even those will still taste great; they just won’t be white.
6. Why do so many public schools brag about graduating students who scored high on a standardized test? Why don’t they brag about graduating students who now have the necessary skills to live in the world and make it and themselves better? Wait, I actually know the answer to this one: Money, and because they aren’t.
7. Why do some men pile their dirty clothes BESIDE the hamper, balance the new roll of toilet paper on top of the spindle, and tear open a box of cereal as though it were some kind of fight to the death?
8. Where are my pie plates and pizza pans? Family: please check your pantries.
9. Why didn’t people pay attention in English class? Don’t they understand that bad grammar and poor spelling make them appear to be, euphemistically speaking, too stupid to piss in a boot? (Gotta love those descriptive southern Indiana sayin’s.)
10. Why do we allow our schools to give the lowest common denominator almost all of the attention, perks, and money, and pay almost no attention whatsoever to the kids who are average and above, polite, kind, nice to each other, attentive, hardworking, musical, artistic, creative, who love to learn and would love to be able to go forward, above and beyond what the standardized curriculum allows them to? Why? How did we come down to this? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? I think it should be.
I might have included a few of my pet themes here, and I may have saved my biggest hobby-horse for last.
Bonus points if you know what “hobby-horse,” in this particular context, means.
Flatulence won't fill the tank.
Mamacita says: When I was a little girl, Dad would often wink at Mom after dinner, and say “Now I’ve got gas; I guess I’ll go out and sit on the car.” And she would roll her eyes and say that HER family didn’t talk like that.
And I would be all happy because, hey. Free gas for the car. Maybe we can get ice cream with the gas money now. I was glad MY family talked like that. Free was good.
I am more than a little bit embarrassed to tell you that I was in the fifth grade before I realized what he was talking about.
Quotation Saturday: Weather
Mamacita says: The weather forecast for Thursday night was a severe snowstorm. It didn’t show up, so I mocked it. On Friday, the snow started falling and hasn’t let up even as I write, which is 3:15 a.m.
I really don’t understand how it could possibly be snowing; I mean, we have plenty of milk and toilet paper. Go figure. This time, household supplies didn’t prevent the storm, but it did delay it.
I like severe weather, as long as it’s not life-threatening. Weather is one of the few things that people can’t control. All the money and power and elitism in the world doesn’t change the fact that when conditions are ripe for rain or snow or hail or sleet or cats & dogs or torrents or tornadoes or hurricanes or hot or cold or frost, that’s exactly what will happen. We can hold weather away from us, but we can’t stop it from “being.”
Fie on you all, rich important people. It’s snowing and you can’t do a thing about it.
The rain it raineth ev’ry day
Upon the just and unjust fellow
But mostly upon the just, because
The unjust hath the just’s umbrella!
1. Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather. -John Ruskin
2. Don’t knock the weather; nine-tenths of the people couldn’t start a conversation if it didn’t change once in a while. –Kin Hubbard
3. Some people walk in the rain, others just get wet. –Roger Miller
4. Many a man curses the rain that falls upon his head, and knows not that it brings abundance to drive away the hunger. — Saint Basil
5. The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found? –J.B. Priestley
6. Any proverbs about weather are doubly true during a storm. –Ed Northstrum
7. It is best to read the weather forecast before praying for rain. –Mark Twain
8. A snowflake is one of God’s most fragile creations, but look what they can do when they stick together! –Author Unknown
9. Bad weather always looks worse through a window. –Tom Lehrer
10. What dreadful hot weather we have! It keeps me in a continual state of inelegance. –Jane Austen
11. Snowmen fall from heaven… unassembled. –Author Unknown
12. I am sure it is a great mistake always to know enough to go in when it rains. One may keep snug and dry by such knowledge, but one misses a world of loveliness. –Adeline Knapp
13. Too often man handles life as he does the bad weather, He whiles away the time as he waits for it to stop. — Alfred Polgar
14. Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative. — Oscar Wilde
15. Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. — Marcelene Cox
16. Among famous traitors of history one might mention the weather. — Ilka Chase
17. I get cold really quickly, but I don’t care. I like weather. I never understand why people move someplace so that they can avoid weather. — Holly Hunter
18. In Scotland, there is no such thing as bad weather – only the wrong clothes. — Billy Connelly
19. One need only think of the weather, in which case the prediction even for a few days ahead is impossible. — Albert Einstein
20. It was so cold I almost got married. — Shelley Winters 
21. Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. — Oscar Wilde
22. All of us could take a lesson from the weather; it pays no attention to criticism. — Unknown
23. In India, “cold weather” is merely a conventional phrase and has come into use through the necessity of having some way to distinguish between weather which will melt a brass door-knob and weather which will only make it mushy. — Mark Twain
24. Few things are as democratic as a snowstorm. — Bern Williams
25. He had read somewhere that the Eskimos had over two hundred words for snow, without which their conversation would probably have got very monotonous. So they would distinguish between thin snow and thick snow, light snow and heavy snow, sludgy snow, brittle snow, snow that came in flurries, snow that came in drifts, snow that came in on the bottom of your neighbour’s boots all over your nice clean igloo floor, the snows of winter, the snows of spring, the snows you remember from your childhood that were so much better than any of your modern snow, fine snow, feathery snow, hill snow, valley snow, snow that falls in the morning, snow that falls at night, snow that falls all of a sudden just when you were going out fishing, and snow that despite all your efforts to train them, the huskies have pissed on. — Douglas Adams
26. Cold! If the thermometer had been an inch longer, we’d all have frozen to death. — Mark Twain
27. I think that’s how Chicago got started. A bunch of people in New York said, ‘Gee, I’m enjoying the crime and the poverty, but it just isn’t cold enough. Let’s go west.’ — Richard Jeni
28. On a gloomy, rainy morning, it came little eight-year-old Tommy’s turn to say the blessing at breakfast. “We thank Thee for this beautiful day,” he prayed. His mother asked him why he said that when the day was anything but beautiful. “Mother,” said he, with rare wisdom, “never judge a day by its weather.” — Unknown
29. Isn’t it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists? — Kelvin Throop
30. No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather. — Michael Pritchard
31. The color of springtime is in the flowers, the color of winter is in the imagination. –Ward Elliot Hour
32. Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation. — Sinclair Lewis
33. Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
34. When one has faith that the spring thaw will arrive, the winter winds seem to lose some of their punch. — Robert L. Veninga
35. Winter is nature’s way of saying, “Up yours.” — Robert Byrne
36. The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball. — Doug Larson
37. When there’s snow on the ground, I like to pretend I’m walking on clouds. — Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata
38. I think winter wear is communal. You get some gloves and a scarf from a lost-and-found box, wash them, wear them for a while until you lose them. Then somebody else does the same thing. — Adrian Grenier
39. Nature has no mercy at all. Nature says, “I’m going to snow. If you have on a bikini and no snowshoes, that’s tough. I am going to snow anyway.” — Maya Angelou
40. The future lies before you, like paths of pure white snow. Be careful how you tread it, for every step will show. — Unknown
41. A change in the weather is sufficient to recreate the world and ourselves.– Marcel Proust
42. Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads not guilty. –Voltaire
43. I’ve lived in good climate, and it bores the hell out of me. I like weather rather than climate. — John Steinbeck
44. Ah, summer, what power you have to make us suffer and like it. –Russel Baker
45. It amazes me that most people spend more time planning next summer’s vacation than they
do planning the rest of their lives. — Patricia Fripp
46. Deep summer is when laziness finds respectability.” — Sam Keen
47. If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant. — Anne Bradstreet
48. The Eskimo has fifty-two names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love. — Margaret Atwood
49. They say that every snowflake is different. If that were true, how could the world go on? How could we ever get up off our knees? How could we ever recover from the wonder of it? — Jeanette Winterson
50. You are not a beautiful, unique snowflake… This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.
— Chuck Palahniuk
