Carrots
The most unusual engagement ring I ever made was for a woman whose hobby was raising rabbits. She got a ring that looked like a carrot: a pear shaped orange sapphire for the carrot and 3 small marquise green tsavorite garnets for the leaves. A one carrot engagement ring!
Bankers’ Hours
Back in the pre everything 24/7 era, banks would only be open weekdays from 9 to 3, and maybe Saturday morning. I asked the branch manager of my bank what they did after 3 o’clock. “That’s when we play with the money,” he said.
Beware the Ides of April
Studies of insurance claims show a consistent spike in claims of lost jewelry at tax time.
Fashion Police Arrest Counterfeiters
The Chinese burn paper or cardboard replicas of things the recently deceased will need in the next world at funerals.
Houses, sometimes complete with paper servants and furniture, televisons, $10,000 bills, and, of course, brand name luxuries— Mercedes, Rolexes, and expensive handbags are among the offerings.
Police in New York busted a Chinatown store clerk in 2011 for selling fake Louis Vuitton and Burberry handbags, cardboard fake fakes, not real fakes.
The charge was copyright infringment. The clerk was taken away in handcuffs, jailed overnight and arraigned the next morning.
The other store employees then prudently covered up the insignia on a four foot fake fake BMW.
Fairy Floss
You’d think the National Confectioners Association would have picked a day other than December 7 for National Cotton Candy Day. You know about “a date which will live in infamy”, right?
Spun sugar as an expensive luxury goes back to the 18th century. A dentist (!) and a confectioner invented the cotton candy machine in 1897. The machine debuted at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Their “Fairy Floss” sold 68,655 boxes at 25¢, $6.50 2015 equivalent.
A large cone of cotton candy has less sugar than a can of soda, because it’s mainly air. Tootsie Roll is the largest manufacturer of cotton candy.
Why December? County fair season is in the summer. July 4th would be better. Then you could call it Freedom Floss.
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Huh?
So why are you here? I wrote a book. I want to sell it. This is the book plug.
I ain’t gonna get rich from it so why am I doing this? Ego. Not too much, because (surprise!) I’m an old guy. Your ego gets smaller and your father gets wiser when you get older.
Rollover here for old guy lessons.
Express myself. I write. Somebody has to read. This site has a variety of articles from the book.
You can buy it on Amazon for $20.95 for the print edition and $9.95 for the Kindle edition. It won’t look good on the tiny Kindle screen, but there’s a free Kindle app you can download to read it on a tablet, PC, or laptop. It looks good on an iPad. Also available as an ebook which you can read on any device.
Made in China
Mr. John P. Young, managing editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, who has had close observation of California’s Chinese residents for thirty years, thinks that the commercial future to which the plunderers of China are looking forward may not prove so rosy as they anticipate. Indeed, he predicts that China’s population of 400,000,000, when awakened and introduced to Western civilization, instead of clamoring for European and American products, will begin to produce these articles themselves, not for their own use, but for us and at such ruinous prices that the labor market of the world will suffer a terrible blow.
— The literary Digest, Dec. 23, 1899
Waste Management
Coffee beans are seeds of the coffee plant that are inside the bright red fruit, called a coffee cherry. Coffee cherries are sweet and Elephants love them.
In northern Thailand some 20 elephants are fed coffee cherries grown on nearby coffee plantations. Coffee cherries go in and coffee beans come out the other end of the elephant. The beans are plucked from the dung and sun dried and roasted.
It takes 10,000 coffee cherries to make a kilogram of Black Ivory coffee, the most expensive in the world at $50 a cup and $500 a pound. The coffee is said to be exceptionally smooth thanks to the digestive enzymes of the elephant.
In Indonesia, coffee cherries are fed to civets and the beans collected from their droppings. Civet coffee is $320 a pound.
Waste Management
I spotted this useful item in a catalog:
“When gas sneaks up on you, there’s no worry you’ll be found out with this ultra-thin polyester mat. Perfect for those on medication or who love spicy food.”
You put it on your chair and sit on it. It’s an anti-whoopee cushion. The secret ingredient is activated charcoal.
And if it doesn’t work, you can always blame the dog.
Lackabucks Disease
Lackabucks disease is caused by atrophy of the pecunial sac. Can progress from falling from the lap of luxury to noseprints on windows to sniping in the gutter to running out of green before you fade to black. The cure is a shot in the arm of lotsabucks (or lotterybucks).
Keep on Truckin’
Saw this on the back of a dump truck.
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Roll over for
Old Guy Lessons
1. Wear baggy pants.
2. Say what you think.
The Rain in Tourane Falls Mainly in the Plane
Da Nang, Viet Nam was also known by its French name, Tourane. Even today there is a Grand Tourane Hotel.
Leaving Da Nang at the end of 1966, we were flown out on an unpressurized C-123 cargo plane. The humidity must have been 100% and when the plane ascended clouds formed inside the plane and it actually rained on us.
— Adapted from Oscar Wilde
Illegal Immigrant
In 1924, Osbert, a stag fleeing hunting hounds in west Kent, jumped into the English Channel. Halfway to France, he was rescued by a French ship and taken to Dunkirk.
The captain of the ship was threatened with a fine for carrying an animal without a license. He appealed to the Ministry of Agriculture which determined that Osbert wasn’t of the French deer type, so he didn’t exist and recommended that he be shot.
But the police said it was out of season for deer and he could get into trouble. Dunkirk officials then contacted the Master of the Hunt that drove Osbert into the sea asking that he be sent back home but the British Ministry of Agriculture informed them that this would require a six month quarantine.
“By this time the plight of Osbert has aroused a spirited controversy over hunts of all kinds, the inhumanity of which was alleged vigorously by some and as vigorously denied by others. This dispute lasted for months wherever Britons dwelt.”1
Osbert’s fame attracted an offer by the Prince of Wales to buy him, but Celistin Bozino, a restaurateur from Le Toquet bought Osbert, but not for venison. He set Osbert free in a park.2
When Osbert died in 1933, Osbert’s mounted head was presented to Edward Prince of Wales by Bozano and Joe Costa, a French tugboat captain who called himself “the Commodore of the Channel Swimmers” and who claimed to have accompanied 33 cross-channel swimmers.3
1. The Ottawa Journal, July 8, 1933.
2. Winnipeg Tribune, August 12, 1933.
3. The Great Swim (2008) by Gavin Mortimer.
Rollover for
Roll over for
Til Death Do We Part
This is not in the book. It’s an elegy for my late wife.
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