The pictured cork bottle-stoppers remain shrouded in mystery. Of course I know who owned them and where the hand-carved and painted collection originated: brought from France by my grandfather. He emigrated to the U.S. shortly before WWI. There isn’t a lot of detail about his growing up before that. What is a fact is that he spent his new life
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In the classic 1939 movie Hunchback of Notre Dame hump-backed bell-ringer Quasimodo [played by Charles Laughton] from a deaf judge receives a sentence of fifty lashes.[*] From the pillory after the last one he begs for a drink of “ Water. Water.” The masses guffaw derisively. Only the beautiful gypsy girl Esmeralda dares to walk through the hushed throng and
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This afternoon my memory was jogged as I wandered inside the local Walmart. There they were stacked up in an aisle so that you couldn’t avoid them: Twinkies. I tried to just walk-on-by but the smile on my face forced a U-turn to pick up a box. The fact that they are both Limited Edition and Key Lime Slimed only added to the
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It could be a guy thing: appreciating all kinds of tools. And I am not talking about ubiquitous, electronic gizmos. The subject is tactile instruments that you hold in your two hands to accomplish a task: forged steel, careful twists of aluminum or sculpted wood. It might even be a combination of all three and more. For example, I have
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Comfort food. We all have at least one. What’s yours? One of mine is Dunkin Donuts, but not just any of their assorted shapes and tastes. I fall victim to The French Cruller. Oo la la, sooooo good it is enough to make Marie Antoinette say, “Let them eat French Crullers”. Until a few years ago there weren’t any Dunkin’s
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[This event really happened. The article first appeared in December, 2005, in a webzine that I had with my daughter. In view of the recent killing-by-rifle of a gorilla in a zoo in Ohio I dust this off and offer it here in desktodirt. Please do not attribute any political motives to this story: there aren’t any. In my case, respecting animals is non-partisan.] After
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“All Scorpions are venomous. Only about 25-30 of them have a type of venom that is potent enough to make someone very ill or to kill them.”[*] I’m glad I searched that. If I hadn’t I might have thought all 90 of the species could kill me; that “only” means my chances of dying-by-bite are down to roughly one in
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My neighbor recently introduced pitch black “Studly” – formally known by an ear tag as 98 – to his modest family of cows. He arrived with subdued fanfare: if a dozen regaled trumpeters were normally lined up to salute a lad of his breeding, in this case – due to budgetary restraints – he’d get one. Like the equivalent of a teenager, his mind
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I remember as a young child seeing on television this smiling, benevolent-looking man covered in flowing orange cloth. He was a visitor from a place far away; he was the Dalai Lama from Tibet. [Of all the countless images and thoughts that pass through a mind in a lifetime, why do a few stay stuck, and others simply whiz by
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What a beautiful day it was yesterday: clear blue, sunny sky, with a hint of coolness from a north breeze. We need days like this to dry out the slog from the last few weeks of record-breaking rain. It is also a primo day to work on the motorcycle. Sitting outside on my stool with wrenches at the ready I
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